Some good news!
New York Court Reverses Lower Court, Upholds NYVRA
Nicholas Stephanopoulos
January 30, 2025, 11:02 am
In a major decision today, a New York appellate court reversed a trial court decision striking down the New York Voting Rights Act on its face. The court held that the town of Newburgh wouldn’t necessarily be forced to violate the Equal Protection Clause by any remedy the town might be ordered to adopt. Accordingly, the town lacked the capacity to facially challenge the NYVRA. Harvard Law School’s Election Law Clinic is helping to litigate this case, and I argued the appeal in December. The case will now head to trial on plaintiffs’ vote dilution claims. Some excerpts from the decision are below:
For the reasons discussed below, it cannot be said as a matter of law on this record that compliance with the NYVRA would force the defendants to violate the Equal Protection Clause.
[R]ace-based districting is only one of the possible remedies under the NYVRA; the NYVRA also contemplates remedies that do not sort voters based on race, such as such as ranked-choice voting, cumulative voting, limited voting, and the elimination of staggered terms. . . .
Further, we conclude that the NYVRA need not contain the first Gingles precondition, that the “minority group . . . be sufficiently large and [geographically] compact to constitute a majority in a reasonably configured district” to survive a facial challenge to its constitutionality under the Equal Protection Clause. The United States Supreme Court has never said that the Gingles test was required by the constitution, as opposed to resulting from a statutory interpretation of section 2 of the FVRA. The only time the Fourteenth Amendment is mentioned in the majority opinion in Gingles is in the background section where the court noted that the plaintiffs’ lawsuit challenged the subject districts as violating the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in addition to violating section 2 of the FVRA. The reason that the United States Supreme Court included the first Gingles precondition was because of its conclusion that if the minority group were unable to demonstrate that it was sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district, “the multi-member form of the district [could not] be responsible for minority voters’ inability to elect its candidates” (id. at 50). Gingles was not contemplating influence districts or remedies such as ranked-choice voting, cumulative voting, limited voting, or the elimination of staggered terms. . . . Since the NYVRA specifically allows for remedies that might allow for minorities to elect their candidates of choice or influence the outcome of elections without their constituting a majority in a single-member district, it was rational for the New York Legislature to not include the first Gingles precondition as a precondition to liability under the NYVRA.
Further, while the text of the NYVRA is unlike the FVRA in that it does not require the plaintiff in every vote dilution case to show that “under the ‘totality of the circumstances’ . . . the political process is not ‘equally open’ to minority voters,” in order to obtain a remedy under the NYVRA, a plaintiff still must show that “vote dilution” has occurred, and that there is an alternative practice that would allow the minority group to “have equitable access to fully participate in the electoral process.” Thus, the NYVRA does not significantly differ from the FVRA in this respect.
Finally, even if it were unconstitutional to apply the NYVRA in situations where the Gingles test has not been satisfied, the NYVRA could still be constitutionally applied in situations where the Gingles test has been satisfied. All parties agree that the FVRA as interpreted by Gingles is constitutional (see Allen v Milligan, 599 US at 41). Here, the plaintiffs contend that the evidence they submitted in opposition to the defendants’ motion demonstrates that each element of the Gingles test has been satisfied.
http://electionlawblog.org/?p=148406
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