Robert Hornak
Robert Hornak is a veteran political consultant who has previously served as the Deputy Director of the Republican Assembly Leader’s NYC office and as Executive Director of the Queens Republican Party. He can be reached at rahornak@gmail. com and @roberthornak on X.
Last week, Judge Jeffrey Pearlman, a Hochul appointee who previously served as Hochul’s Special Counsel as well as her Chief of Staff while she was Lt. Governor, threw out the lines of the 11th Congressional District, represented by NYC’s only Republican House member, Nicole Malliotakis.
The suit, filed by Democrat election law firm Elias Law Group on be- half of four registered New York City voters, claims that the 11th District was drawn, by the Democratic Party, in a way that disenfranchises Black and Hispanic voters. This would actually be the Democrats THIRD attempt at redrawing NY’s congressional lines since the 2020 census.
Drawing politically gerrymandered district lines was made much harder in NY due to a voter referendum passed in 2014 designed to curtail exactly what the Democrats have desperately been trying to do since 2022. The referendum empowered the Independent Redistricting Commission to draw lines once – and only once – every ten years that do not create advantage for either political party.
In other words, NY’s majority of Democrat voters believe that elections should be fair, without the political leadership in control trying to rig the process. This wasn’t really an issue for decades when control of the state legislature was split and both sides had to agree and compromise on the new
lines. But since Democrats took control of both legislatives houses in 2019, they have sought every possible way to undermine the will of the voters of their state.
In 2022, they refused to pass the lines the IRC submitted, and went ahead with their own, constitutionally negligent, redistricting plan. Lawsuits were naturally filed, forcing the state Supreme Court to step in and appoint a special master to handle the once- in-a-decade redrawing of districts in a way that met constitutional requirements. In the 2022 election, after the state lost one seat due to declining population, Republicans performed well with the new, non-partisan lines and picked up three seats, leaving Democrats with a 15-11 majority after an election where the Republican candidate for governor pulled approximately 45% of the vote.
But Democrats were beside them- selves seeing Republicans get their fair share of the state’s congressional seats and brought a lawsuit to redraw the lines once again for the 2024 election. They claimed that by once-in-a decade the state constitution meant once each decade – by the legislature. They argued the court-drawn lines were only meant to be temporary.
A Democrat judge agreed with this argument and gave Albany Democrats another chance. They redrew the lines and after taking back the 3rd district in a special election earlier in 2024, Democrats were able to flip back another three seats in the 2024 General Election. The balance was now 19-7.
Now NY Democrats are trying once again, flouting the will of the voters and the intent of the state constitution, to get yet another attempt to gerrymander the state’s congressional lines. And on the most specious argument – once again.
The lawsuits claims that the growing Black and Hispanic population of Staten Island was disenfranchised by the Democrats who drew the district previously, and therefore, the Republican in office, who is mixed Hispanic and Greek, should have her lines redrawn to include lower Manhattan instead of areas of south Brooklyn that are just across the water and most contiguous to Staten Island.
They claim this would better represent the Island, with its demographics at 56% white and nearly 30% Black and Hispanic, according to the suit. However, if you look at the Statistical Atlas of the US, the demographics of the Island are 62.6% White, 17% His- panic, 10.3% Black, and 8% Asian. For the entire 11th CD it’s 61.6% White, 15.6% Hispanic, 7.5% Black, and 13.3% Asian.
Yes, the percent of Black and His- panic voters did drop slightly, but so did White voters in favor of Asian voters who gained significantly. However,the alleged remedy, cutting out the Asian and Hispanic neighborhoods in Brooklyn and replacing them with lower Manhattan, draws in an area also known for its significant population of Asians and Hispanics, but who are seen as more liberal and reliable Democrat voters.
This is exactly what NY voters tried to prevent in their 2014 referendum and hopefully the appeal will overturn a very bad decision by a very partisan judge.
