ALBANY, N.Y. — An upstate appellate judge said New York’s newly drawn congressional and legislative districts will remain in place for the time being.
State Appellate Division Justice Stephen Lindley of Rochester extended an already issued temporary stay that keeps the new district maps in play for petitioning purposes, pending appeal.
Lindley’s extension will run through April 20, when oral arguments will be heard.
The decision comes a week after a lower court judge in Steuben County found the recently redrawn maps unconstitutional and gerrymandered to benefit Democrats.
Supreme Court Judge Patrick McAllister, a Republican, gave the Democrat-led state Legislature until April 11 to submit new maps in his March 31 ruling.
The Republican-backed lawsuit that led to the ruling argued Democrats illegally gerrymandered the maps to favor themselves, violating a 2014 constitutional provision creating an independent commission meant to take politics out of the process.
The 10-member bipartisan panel wound up deadlocked earlier this year and voted to send a pair of competing maps, one drawn up by Republicans and one by Democrats, to lawmakers.
That allowed the Legislature, in which Democrats have a supermajority, to draw their own maps.
Gov. Hochul, a Democrat, signed off on the final product in February, all but guaranteeing that Albany and New York’s congressional delegation would remain blue for the next decade.
Lindley’s ruling means the state Board of Elections can still accept petitions filed by candidates running for office in the new districts and keeps things on track for the state’s primary on June 28.
Still, Lindley said he would allow McAllister to retain a neutral expert to draw up a new Congressional map to be used should the current maps be struck down.
The legislature could also draw up a contingency map, Lindley added.
“The Legislature may begin redrawing the map right now if it chooses to do so,” he said. “Or the Legislature may choose to do nothing and risk the possibility of having to live with the map drawn by Judge McAllister’s neutral experts should respondents lose before the Court of Appeals and lack sufficient time to propose a substitute map that withstands constitutional scrutiny after exhaustion of appellate remedies.”
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