Judge hits district boundaries for New York City’s only Republican House seat

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — A judge on Wednesday threw out the boundaries of New York City’s only congressional seat represented by a Republican, ordering the state to redraw the district because its current composition unconstitutionally dilutes the votes of Black and Hispanic residents.

Republicans are expected to appeal the decision, opening a new front in the nationwide gerrymandering battle in which the two political parties are vying for an advantage in the struggle for control of the US House of Representatives.

Read more: Federal judges are allowing California to use the new U.S. House map before the 2026 midterm elections

Lawmakers in about a third of states have considered redrawing their House districts after President Donald Trump pushed Republicans to draft new lines that would help his party maintain its narrow majority in the midterm elections. Although Democrats have sometimes been stymied by laws they passed aimed at preventing partisan gerrymandering.

In New York, state Supreme Court Justice Jeffrey Perelman handed Democrats an early victory in the battle, ruling that the district controlled by Republican U.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis in southern Brooklyn and Staten Island must be reconstituted.

The case, brought by a Democratic Party-aligned election law firm, said the district lines do not represent Staten Island’s rising black and Latino population, and instead pushes for the seat to be redrawn to include parts of lower Manhattan, which lean more liberal.

The judge said the petitioners showed strong evidence of the existence of a “racially polarized voting bloc,” as well as “a history of discrimination that affects present-day political participation and representation,” and “that racist appeals continue to exist in political campaigns today.”

But instead of redrawing the seat himself, Perelman ordered New York’s bipartisan independent redistricting commission to redraw the district’s boundaries by February 6, a rapidly approaching deadline.

The redistricting commission has the primary authority to draw congressional maps, and is supposed to do so without manipulating boundaries to give any party a political advantage. But in the past, that commission sometimes failed to reach agreement on the district’s formation, which then gave the Democratic-controlled state Legislature the ability to adjust the lines to their advantage.

Republicans criticized the lawsuit as an apparent effort to gerrymander the district to help Democrats and eliminate one of the few remaining GOP districts in the state. Home to about 500,000 people, Staten Island is New York City’s smallest and most suburban borough, and better resembles New Jersey’s nearby cities than metropolitan Manhattan, just a ferry ride across the river.

In a statement after the ruling, Malliotakis said: “This is a frivolous attempt by Democrats in Washington to steal this congressional seat from the people and we are very confident that we will prevail in the end.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has pledged to fight the redistricting battle at the national level, but she has few legislative avenues to significantly change the state’s congressional lines before the election.

The state’s current map was drawn by Democrats — after a long battle in which they rejected a proposal drafted by a bipartisan redistricting commission — and is designed to give their party a boost in a few crucial districts ahead of the 2024 election. Democrats picked up a few seats in New York under that map, though Republicans ultimately won a majority in the House.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Wednesday’s ruling “is the first step toward ensuring that communities of interest remain intact from Staten Island to lower Manhattan. New York voters deserve the fairest possible congressional map.”