A group of New Yorkers has filed a lawsuit against the state’s board of elections alleging that its congressional map unconstitutionally dilutes the voting power of Black and Latino residents of Staten Island.
The complaint, filed Monday, is another volley in the battle between Democrats and Republicans to redraw congressional districts in a way that favors their party in advance of the midterm elections.
The suit concerns the 11th congressional district, which is represented by Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, and challenges part of the map approved by the majority Democratic New York legislature less than two years ago.
But in the wake of Donald Trump’s call for Texas and other red states to redraw their maps to help the party pick up more seats in 2026, Democrats have responded by trying to do the same thing in states like California and Maryland.
Democrats in California and New York trying to counter Republican efforts could be hurt by their own efforts to prevent gerrymandering, said Michael Kang, a law professor at Northwestern University and an expert on redistricting.
“The Democrats are trying to respond, but they have much greater obstacles – legal obstacles – in their way in places like California and New York, where they have engaged in this kind of good government redistricting reform and put hurdles in the way of being able to partisan gerrymander and do so on a mid-decade basis,” Kang said.
In New York, the lawsuit was filed by Elias Law Group, which has also worked with Democrats on court cases concerning redistricting and congressional maps in Texas, Nevada and Wisconsin.
The new petition states that the district boundaries do not account for the increase in Staten Island’s Black and Latino populations in recent decades and violate the New York Voting Rights Act.
The district’s antiquated boundaries “instead confine Staten Island’s growing Black and Latino communities in a district where they are routinely and systematically unable to influence elections for their representative of choice, despite the existence of strong racially polarized voting and a history of racial discrimination and segregation on Staten Island”, the suit states.
New York Democrats would have a harder time trying to redraw the state congressional map than Republicans in Texas because in 2014, voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to have a commission, rather than lawmakers, draw legislative districts.
As such, the soonest the state could “make some changes on the commission and some of the limitations on gerrymandering in the state constitution”, would be before the 2028 election, said Shawn Donahue, a University of Buffalo political science professor and expert on redistricting.
The lawsuit “seems to be a way that, if they are successful, to at least make some changes to one district”, Donahue said.
