With perpetual redistricting, New York voters lose

New York State’s repeated ad hoc revisions of legislative maps through the 2020s has been pushing the state’s seemingly perpetual redistricting process ever further from the good-government goal of clarity, fairness and timeliness.

Now another inopportune and highly disputed rewrite may be coming.

Acting state Supreme Court Justice Jeffrey Pearlman this week ordered a new congressional map drafted by Feb. 6, quite late in the 10-year redistricting cycle. Candidates are due to start collecting nomination petition signatures later in the month. Pearlman has decided that the 11th Congressional District, which incumbent Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis won with 64% in 2024, disempowers Staten Island’s minority voters, as Democrats have claimed in a lawsuit.

Shifting one district’s lines means altering other districts, thus increasing the potential for systemic confusion. Pearlman, meanwhile, directed the task to the state’s Independent Redistricting Commission, which is evenly bipartisan and has proved vulnerable to deadlock.

Reapportionment and redistricting all over the country are supposed to occur once per decade, to reflect population changes in the U.S. census. In New York, state voters amended the constitution in 2014 to ban gerrymandering by either party.

Now, more than a decade later, the setting of congressional lines by and for states belongs to a wider national cold war between the major parties. President Donald Trump provoked the latest controversial chapter by telling powerful Republicans in Texas, North Carolina and elsewhere to redistrict this cycle, all to keep control of the House. Texas Republicans complied most prominently and were upheld at the Supreme Court.

The Democrats, who dominate elected offices in New York, say they are helping to legally respond in kind. The question is how objectively nonpartisan the relevant judicial decisions in the fight will be. Pearlman was a staffer for Gov. Kathy Hochul and State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. He denied Republican requests to recuse himself in the case.

State GOP chairman Ed Cox said in a statement: “This was a partisan ruling made by a partisan judge in a case brought by a notoriously partisan attorney (top national Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias). Kathy Hochul and Albany Democrats did not alter this district when they had a chance in 2024.” But Hochul, who gets to approve any redistricting if it passes, said in her own statement: “The New York State Constitution guarantees the principles of fair representation, and New Yorkers in every community deserve these protections.”

The ruling will be appealed and is expected to be reviewed in the Appellate Division and then the state Court of Appeals sooner rather than later. Each of the seven members of the top panel were nominated by a Democratic governor.

The citizens now can only rely on the courts to be detached and thorough in their reasoning, despite the time pressures of this nationally supercharged case. Otherwise, amid the confusion of partisan redistricting, voters won’t win.