New York’s top court invalidated the state’s congressional map on Wednesday, ruling that Democrats' redistricting process and resulting maps violated the state Constitution.
The 4-3 decision is a blow to Democrats who would have won three additional seats in the U.S. House based on the political boundary lines and is likely to help Republicans secure a modest lead in national redistricting. The decision also voided Democrats' state Senate map.
The Court of Appeals on Tuesday heard oral arguments in the suit, in which Republican voters had claimed that Democrats violated the state's new Constitutionally-mandated process for redistricting and gerrymandered the maps for their political benefit.
In 2014, New York voters created a bipartisan commission redistricting process, writing anti-gerrymandering reforms into the state's constitution. But when the commission failed to produce a final set of maps, the Democratic-controlled legislature drew and enacted their own maps earlier this year.
In court on Wednesday, Democrats defended this as a lawful solution to the commission's failure and argued that the Congressional map Republicans claimed was a partisan gerrymander had actually been designed to protect minority voting rights.
The court disagreed. In a majority opinion signed by Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals Janet DiFiore, the court wrote that the legislature had clearly defied anti-gerrymandering reforms by doing “exactly what they would have done had the 2014 constitutional reforms never been passed.”
The court has sent the case back to a lower court, where an outside expert — known as a special master — will be hired to redraw the state maps.
“Nearly a century and a half ago, we wrote that “[t]he Constitution is the voice of the people speaking in their sovereign capacity, and it must be heeded”,” the court concluded. “Today, we again uphold those constitutional standards by adhering to the will of the People of this State and giving meaningful effect to the 2014 constitutional amendments."
In a statement, New York State Senate Majority Communications Director Mike Murphy said, “We are reviewing the decision.”
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