On November 17, a group of voters filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, arguing that the New York legislature will very likely fail to complete the redistricting process for U.S. House and state legislative districts, and asking the Court to handle redistricting. The New York Senate is controlled by Republicans and the Assembly by Democrats. See this story. The case has been assigned to Judge Dora Irizarry, a Bush Jr. appointee.
Here is the complaint. The case is Favors v Cuomo, cv11-5632, eastern district. Most of the plaintiffs are leaders is community organizations. They say that it is vital that the members and activists of their organizations engage in the political process, but because the redistricting process is so far from being complete, they are stymied. Also, one of the plaintiffs wishes to run for the legislature in 2012, but with no districts even close to being in place, he cannot determine whether he has a suitable district to run in.
The lawsuit also points out that last year, the New York legislature passed a law requiring that prisoners be counted, for redistricting, at the address where they lived before they went to prison. The lawsuit explains that the process of adjusting the population data to comply with this law is a time-consuming process that is not progressing fast enough. Thanks to Bill Van Allen for the link to the complaint.
This article doesn’t name any of the organizations or individuals who are filing suit. I’ll do what I can to find out, but in the meantime does anyone else know who’s doing this?
ANTI-Democracy minority rule gerrymanders in ALL Brit-American regimes since about 1618 — VA – first gerrymander.
P.R. and App.V.
municiple legislatve redistricting related hearing in NYS supreme court Kings County (Brooklyn) Tuesday morning Nov 22nd. positve outcome will impact Ulster County districting if judge allows intervention and ultimately 2012 election injunction.
re: state constitution NYC far too large and most upstate counties such as Ulster are too small for home rule relative to unconstitutionally over-reaching NYC — all based upon existing NYS constitutional districting scheme.
#1, the post has been expanded, and now has a link to the complaint. All the plaintiffs are individuals but most of them are officers of organizations, such as a local Community Mental Health Center, or a Youth Civic Leadership Academy.
Ok, that’s helpful. Plaintiffs are from Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, Westchester (which borders on New York City), and the Ithaca area. All can safely be considered “Democratic” areas. The question arises, which Democrats are attempting to force the issue in this way? Is it the Governor’s camp, or is this initiative coming from some of the legislature’s Democrats?
I can say that none of these individuals nor their organizations are familiar to me, and I have attended meeting and paid a fair amount of attention to the official redistricting task force as they have conducted their work.
In fact, I called on the state’s major “good government groups” to join together to form their own independent redistricting commission and construct our own districts for state and congressional elections next year, a call which was not answered.
Again – a *democratic* legislative body exists ONLY because ALL of the Electors-Voters in each Fed/State/Local can NOT generally appear in person and vote directly on legislation.
Much too difficult for the millions of math MORONS in the U.S.A. to apparently detect — esp. in SCOTUS — brainwashed by ALL of the gerrymander regimes since 4 July 1776 — esp. the U.S.A. regimes since 4 Mar 1789.