This week: What’s Next For New York’s Mid-Decade Redistricting- And Beyond?; Blakeman Wins Funding Challenge Against State Public Finance Campaign Board; Candidate Validating Procedures; Blakeman Seeing Third Party Line in November?; State Funds Census 2030 Efforts With a New Census Commission; Attorney General’s Preclearance Activity; Post-Callais Action: Louisiana Enacts New Congressional Map; Around the Nation (From Redistricting Network)
REDISTRICTING & LITIGATION
What’s Next For New York’s Mid-Decade Redistricting- And Beyond?
As of press time, additional or amended constitutional amendments have not been introduced in the Senate or Assembly. In an interview earlier today, Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris indicated that talks are still underway and that there might only be one amendment considered before the legislature adjourns at the end of the week.
An Update will be sent out when more details are known.
In the meantime, a group of Senate and Assembly Republican members held an Albany press conference earlier today with NY Congressman Mike Lawler (D-Rockland) in opposition to new redistricting amendments. The legislators suggested that New York was the first to initiate mid-decade redistricting after the Hoffman and other lawsuits were initiated by Democrats seeking to redraw congressional district lines in recent years.
Campaign Finance: Blakeman v. New York State Public Campaign Finance Board
On Tuesday, March 31 the New York Public Campaign Finance Board (PCFB) voted in a 4-3 decision along party lines to deny Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman, public campaign matching funds in his race because Blakeman’s running mate, Madison County sheriff Todd Hood, did not submit the required paperwork by the deadline.
On Tuesday, May 12, Judge Denise A. Hartman ruled that the PCFB must give Blakeman one week to file the proper form for the chance to receive public matching funds.
However, on Wednesday, May 13, the PCFB filed its notice of appeal to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court. The question was whether a campaign seeking public funds gets another chance after failing to meet a mandatory filing deadline.
On Thursday, May 28th., the Third Appellate Division of the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s order. The court’s main reasoning was because the PCFB failed to follow its own established regulations and procedural rules.
Under the PCFB’s regulations, if the Board determines that a candidate’s application or certification is incomplete, it is legally required to issue a deficiency notice and provide the candidate an opportunity to fix the mistake.
Further, the Board’s counsel during oral arguments conceded that the PCFB had never created a specific joint-certification form for gubernatorial tickets.
The court was also focused on the question of whether Hood’s application to the matching funds program was directly connected to Blakeman’s. Blakeman’s attorneys argued that since the governor and lieutenant governor run a joint ticket, they are essentially a single team.
ELECTIONS
Candidate Validating Proceedings and the Need to Plead with Particularity
By: Joseph T. Burns
New York’s Election Law gives candidates a powerful tool to fight back when a Board of Elections invalidates their petition. But that tool – the ability to file a proceeding to validate a petition – comes with a strict and unforgiving condition: the candidate must identify, with specificity, exactly which signatures the Board improperly invalidated. This does not mean categories of errors. It does not mean estimates. And it is not a request for the court to go find the BOE’s mistakes itself. The candidate must identify specific signatures, specific determinations, and specific claims of error on the part of the BOE. Two decisions issued this month — one from Albany County Supreme Court and one from the Appellate Division, Second Department — demonstrate just how seriously courts take this requirement, and what happens to the candidates who do not.
Under Election Law § 16-102, a candidate whose petition has been invalidated may go to court to have it restored. But the law comes with a demanding procedural requirement that courts have consistently enforced: the candidate must specify the individual determinations of the Board of Elections that he or she claims were incorrect, including identifying the particular signatures that were improperly invalidated. A broad allegation that the BOE made mistakes is not enough.
The recent Albany County Supreme Court case of Matter of Bunkeddeko v. Dizon Urbano put an exclamation point on that requirement of pleading with particularity. In this proceeding, the candidate had initially appeared in court and conceded that his designating petition did not contain the minimum number of valid signatures. But a week later, the candidate tried to revive his proceeding to validate. The court, however, declined to allow this. In its decision, the court pointed out that the candidate had known the contents of his own designating petition since it was filed on April 6, 2026; he received notice of a general objection to his petition on April 9; he was served with specific objections to his petition on April 15; and he had a preliminary report from the staff of the New York State Board of Elections before the original return date of this matter. The court also noted that even with that extensive notice of his petition’s deficiencies, the candidate had yet to identify the signatures invalidated by the BOE that he sought to validate. Because the candidate had not articulated which signatures he sought to validate, the court declined to sign the Order to Show Cause to reinstate the proceeding to validate.
The Second Department’s decision in Matter of Kennedy v. Board of Elections in the City of New York addressed a similar deficiency in the candidate’s pleadings. In this matter, the candidate submitted a designating petition containing 9,551 signatures for a Civil Court Judge race in Brooklyn; four thousand valid signatures were required for the petition to be valid. The BOE found 6,501 of the signatures on the candidate’s petition to be invalid, leaving her nearly 1,000 short of the minimum required. In her validating petition, the candidate alleged that the BOE incorrectly invalidated hundreds of signatures and potentially more than 1,000. In addition to other vague allegations, the candidate asked the court to conduct a line-by-line review of the entire petition to see whether the BOE had made enough mistakes to allow her petition to meet the Election Law’s minimum number of valid signatures. The trial court declined to take up this task and found that the candidate had failed to plead with particularity. This decision by the trial court to dismiss the candidate’s proceeding to validate was affirmed unanimously by the Second Department.
Candidates, campaign staff and party leaders can learn a number of valuable lessons from these two decisions.
First, don’t forget the very tight statute of limitations for proceedings to validate a petition. From the moment a Board of Elections issues its final determination of invalidity, the clock is running. Candidates and campaigns that wait to retain counsel, or that spend too much time assessing the potential for a proceeding to validate to succeed, risk finding themselves time-barred before a court ever hears the merits of their case.
Second, vague allegations do not work. Courts are not going to do the work for you. A candidate who asks a judge to comb through thousands of signatures and find enough errors to validate a petition clearly does not understand what is legally required in a proceeding to validate.
This means preparation has to start well before a BOE issues its final determination. By the time specific objections are filed — which will identify the precise signatures at issue — campaigns should already be reviewing their petition and preparing for court. The BOE’s staff report provides further notice of where the petition’s problems may be. Candidates who wait until after the BOE’s final determination to start that analysis will almost certainly run out of time.
Finally, these two decisions should serve as a reminder of why experienced election counsel matters. Election Law proceedings are technical, fast-moving, and allow little room for error. The candidates in both of these cases lost not because their substantive arguments were necessarily wrong, but because they did not present those arguments in the way the law requires and within the time the law allows.
Joseph T. Burns is a partner in Holtzman Vogel Baran Torchinsky & Josefiak’s Buffalo office
https://www.holtzmanvogel.com/professionals/joseph-t-burns
Blakeman Seeking Additional Party Line in November?
The New York Post reports that GOP gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman is seeking an additional third party ballot line. The paper reports that Blakeman is looking to run on an independent “Vote Affordable” party line.
CENSUS
State Budget Funds 2030 Census Planning Commission & Non-Profit Funding
The state’s new budget includes $3 million for a census planning commission to be administered by the State Department of Labor. Additional funding is being provided for “census related activities” through a Department of State program that funds non pre-designated non-profit organizations to support community based programming, crisis intervention initiatives, housing assistance, economic development, workforce training, educational initiatives and healthcare services in underserved communities.
Census advocates, led by the New York State Census Partnership, worked with Assembly Members Michaele Solages (D-Nassau) and Landon Dais (D-Bronx) and Senator Jeremy Cooney (D-Monroe) to push for funding to get the state started on preparations for the 2030 census. New York now follows Oklahoma and Arkansas in authorizing state program to prepare for the 2030 count. In late 2025, the New York City Council passed Local Law 9, requiring the Mayor to establish a temporary Office of the Census by 2028 to begin local planning efforts. It is anticipated that the Department of Labor will be guided by several of the provisions in A.5864/S/6894, a bill introduced to codify a statewide Office of Census Services that outlines how funds should be spent for the 2027 Local Update of Census Addresses 9lUCA) effort, early outreach, and complete count initiatives.
N.Y. VOTING RIGHTS ACT PRECLEARANCE
N.Y. Attorney General’s Office Preclearance
1341 Orange County Board of Elections -poll site locations- additional information requested- under review
1381 Nassau County Board of Elections- poll site locations- preliminarily granted
1441 Orange County Board of Elections- early voting hours- preliminarily granted
All submissions can be viewed at: https://nyvra-portal.ag.ny.gov/
POST CALLAIS REDISTRICTING: NEW LA MAP
Louisiana Enacts New Congressional Map Into Law
Louisiana legislators gave their final approval Friday to Senate Bill 121, a congressional redistricting map that eliminates one of the state’s two majority-Black districts and gives Republicans a probable additional U.S. House seat ahead of the November midterms. The state Senate approved the final version 28-10 on party lines after the House had passed it 66-36 the day prior. The new map redraws Democratic Rep. Cleo Fields’ 6th District, clustering it around predominantly white communities in the Baton Rouge area and southern Louisiana, while adding part of Baton Rouge to the majority-Black 2nd District based in New Orleans, currently represented by Democratic Rep. Troy Carter. Gov. Jeff Landry has signed the map into law, according to the legislature’s bill page, making Louisiana the second Southern state to adopt new congressional lines since the Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which invalidated the state’s existing court-ordered map and significantly weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The redistricting process set off a cascade of election administration complications. The day after the Callais ruling, Gov. Landry suspended Louisiana’s U.S. House party primaries, which had been scheduled for May 16. Lawmakers subsequently approved a bill rescheduling those primaries for November 3, reverting from the semi-closed party primary system Louisiana had adopted to a jungle primary format in which all candidates appear on the same ballot, with any runoffs set for December 12. The qualifying period for the rescheduled November elections runs August 5-7, meaning candidates who had already qualified for the original May 16 primary must re-qualify if they still choose to run. The law also voids all ballots already cast in the U.S. House primaries. Secretary of State Nancy Landry said she was unable to remove the House races from the ballots before the May 16 early voting period began, meaning tens of thousands of voters cast ballots in races that have now been nullified. More than 42,000 people had returned absentee ballots before the governor suspended the elections.
Litigation is expected from multiple directions. The Callais plaintiffs, the white voters who brought the original lawsuit and won at the Supreme Court, filed court papers in the Western District of Louisiana this week arguing that SB 121 still fails to remove race from the map’s structure. “If the Legislature fails to enact a new map by then or enacts SB 121 without any substantial changes to the current structure, Plaintiffs may well ask the Court to schedule proceedings to impose a remedy that fully complies with Callais,” their filing states.
AROUND THE NATION
From The Redistrict Network (@RedistrictNet)
May 25: Challengers have appealed the Washington legislative redistricting case to the U.S. Supreme Court, paired with an urgent request to fast-track the case before voters head to the polls. — @RedistrictNet [from X]
May 26: A three-judge panel has blocked Alabama from using its 2023 congressional map for the 2026 midterms. — @RedistrictNet [from X]
May 26: Attorney General Steve Marshall says Alabama will immediately appeal the preliminary injunction blocking the state’s congressional map to the U.S. Supreme Court. — @RedistrictNet [from X]
May 26: The South Carolina Senate has voted to adjourn with a motion to pick up the congressional map again next session.
The action essentially kills the proposed congressional map for 2026. — @RedistrictNet [from X]
May 26: A federal judge has denied a temporary restraining order seeking to block Tennessee’s new congressional map. — @RedistrictNet [from X]
May 26: A Florida judge has denied a motion for a preliminary injunction to block the state’s new congressional map. — @RedistrictNet [from X]
May 27: The Missouri Supreme Court rules that Governor Kehoe had full constitutional authority to call an extraordinary legislative session in 2025 to redraw congressional districts, finding that the governor has broad discretion over such matters. — @RedistrictNet [from X]
May 27: A three-judge panel has been assigned to hear Tennessee’s congressional redistricting cases. — @RedistrictNet [from X]
May 29: Gov. Jeff Landry has signed Louisiana’s new congressional map. The redistricting plan is now law. — @RedistrictNet [from X]
INSTITUTE RESOURCES
The New York Elections, Census and Redistricting Institute has archived many resources for the public to view on our Digital Commons Page.
Our Redistricting Resources page contains resources on the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act. You can access the page here: https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/redistricting_resources/
Archived Updates can be accessed here: https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/redistricting_roundtable_updates/
Please share this weekly update with your colleagues. To be added to the mailing list, please contact [email protected]
The N.Y. Elections, Census & Redistricting Institute is supported by grants from the New York Community Trust, New York Census Equity Fund, the Mellon Foundation, and the New York City Council. This report was prepared by Jeff Wice, Esha Shah, Michelle Davis of Redistricting Online & Jason Fierman of @RedistrictNet.