Opinion ID: 795608
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Primary Election

Text: 35 A network of district lines defines the primary election battlefield. Each judicial candidate stands for election in a particular judicial district. New York currently is divided into 12 judicial districts. N.Y. Const. art. VI, § 6(a), (b). In turn, each judicial district encompasses several other smaller political subdivisions known as assembly districts. See generally N.Y. Const. art. III, § 5. Because judicial districts are so large, each one comprises at least nine assembly districts and as many as 24. The appendix to this opinion contains a map of New York State showing all county borders and assembly and judicial district lines, as well as a similar map of New York City. The appendix also contains individual maps of the First, Second, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Judicial Districts. 36 As noted above, judicial candidates do not run in the primary election themselves. Instead, they have the option of assembling a slate of delegates to run on their behalf, with an eye toward placing those delegates at the judicial nominating convention so that they can cast their votes in favor of the candidate with whom they are affiliated. N.Y. Elec. L. §§ 6-106, -124. This entire slate of delegates, however, does not run for election as one group across the entire judicial district. Instead, small subgroups of delegates stand for election within each assembly district comprising the larger judicial district. N.Y. Elec. L. § 6-124. In this fashion, the primary election consists of a series of contests between groups of delegates within each assembly district. 37 New York allows each political party to determine how many delegate slots to allot per assembly district, but requires that this number be substantially in accordance with the ratio, which the number of votes cast for the party candidate for the office of governor, on the line or column of the party at the last preceding election for such office, in any unit of representation, bears to the total vote cast at such election for such candidate on such line or column in the entire state. N.Y. Elec. L. § 6-124. State law also allows each political party to provide for an equal number of alternate delegates who may attend the convention and vote in the place of delegates who do not attend, which, as described, below, is a common event. Id. The political parties use various formulae to set these numbers. For example, the state Democratic Party begins with a baseline of one delegate and one alternate for each assembly district. It then adds one delegate and one alternate for every 2,500 votes cast on the party's ballot line in the previous gubernatorial election. See Rules of Democratic Party of the State of New York, art. II, § 5. The Republican Party uses a similar formula. See Rules of the New York Republican State Committee, § 18. Although these formulae allot a handful of delegates to each assembly district, the aggregate allotment across an entire judicial district is quite large. In 2004, for example, the parties allotted each judicial district at least 64 total delegates and as many as 248, including alternates. 38 To appear on the primary ballot, the delegates must circulate designating petitions within the assembly district in which they are running. Within a span of 37 days, each slate of delegates must gather 500 valid signatures from party members residing in that assembly district. N.Y. Elec. L. §§ 6-134(4), -136(2)(i), (3). Each party member may sign only one petition. N.Y. Elec. L. § 6-134(3). Consequently, the number of available signatories shrinks each time a party member signs a designating petition. 39 Further, because petition signatures are routinely and successfully challenged pursuant to the one-petition signature rule, among others, each delegate slate must realistically gather between 1,000 and 1,500 signatures to gain a primary ballot position. Taking the lower figure of 1,000 signatures per assembly district, in order to run a full complement of delegates, a judicial candidate must gather at least 9,000 signatures (in the judicial district with only nine assembly districts) and as many as 24,000 signatures (in the judicial district with 24 assembly districts). In addition, because each group of delegates runs in a different assembly district, the signatures must be gathered from a variety of particular subdivisions spread throughout the entire judicial district. 40 At the close of the petitioning period, the State Board of Elections determines which assembly districts present contested delegate races. If only one group of delegates has filed designating petitions in an assembly district, then those delegates are deemed elected. N.Y. Elec. Law § 6-160(2). Delegates who are deemed elected do not appear on the primary ballot. Id. 41 Once the delegates achieve ballot status in contested races, they may not indicate on the ballot the judicial candidate with whom they are affiliated. Accordingly, in order to run delegate slates in any useful fashion, the judicial candidate must inform the primary electorate in each assembly district of which delegates are pledged to her in that specific locale. In the Second Judicial District, for example, which encompasses Brooklyn and Staten Island, a judicial candidate who ran a slate in each assembly district would have to mount 24 different voter education campaigns. In the Fourth Judicial District, which encompasses roughly one quarter of the State's land, a judicial candidate seeking to run a slate in each assembly district must conduct 10 different voter education campaigns across 11 different counties. 42 Three current or former judges, including plaintiff Margarita López Torres, averred that the process described above often shuts out candidates lacking either great wealth or the benefit of a political party's county-wide apparatus. According to those judges, the requirements of the process—recruiting large numbers of delegates and alternates, assembling different delegate slates in each assembly district, recruiting petition circulators, collecting several thousand signatures, and conducting a host of localized voter education campaigns—effectively foreclosed their ability to access the primary election phase. 43 For example, when a former City Court Judge ran for Supreme Court Justice in the Seventh Judicial District, he found that recruiting and running slates of delegates was not a realistic option. To compete in the primary election, he would have had to recruit over 55 people to represent the 11 Assembly Districts that were within [his] Judicial District ... each of whom would have had to be willing to contribute significant energy, time, and money. Finding that he would not be able to recruit this many delegate candidates, he pared down the list to the absolute minimum of delegates he thought he needed to elect to be competitive. Even if he were able to recruit enough delegate candidates, the signature requirements were daunting: he would have to recruit several dozen people to work full-time at gathering at least 9,000 signatures over the course of 37 days. Although an experienced campaigner who was active in county politics for several years prior to running for the Supreme Court, the lower court judge concluded that there was simply no way [he] could overcome these organizational and financial burdens. An Albany City Court Judge, also an experienced campaigner, agreed. After attempting to recruit, organize, and run slates of delegates who were independent of the party leadership in the Third Judicial District, he concluded that the process presented insurmountable structural and practical barriers. 44 Like those two judges, Civil Court Judge Margarita López Torres found that the various delegate and petitioning requirements created impossibly high entry barriers for candidates lacking institutional support—even for those who possessed significant public support. López Torres was an experienced and successful campaigner who twice won countywide election to the Civil Court in Brooklyn—no simple feat considering that Brooklyn includes several million people of myriad racial, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds. In one recent election for Civil Court Judge, she received over 200,000 votes—more than any Democratic candidate for Supreme Court Justice received in Brooklyn that year. 45 Yet López Torres, who sought the Democratic nomination for Supreme Court Justice on several occasions, found that the burdens and barriers to organizing such [delegate] campaigns are truly insurmountable for those candidates who lack the county party leaders' backing. Faced with those barriers in her 1998 campaign for Supreme Court Justice, she realized that [she] had no realistic chance to fulfill the primary election balloting requirements despite her substantial public support. Accordingly, she ended [her] bid for the [Democratic] nomination for Supreme Court Justice. 46 While these regulations effectively prohibit candidates who lack the support of the party leadership from putting their slates of delegates on the primary election ballot, candidates backed by the local party leadership easily navigate the primary system with the benefit of the party's pre-existing apparatus. Within each county, the party leadership consists of the county leader, who chairs the party's county committee, and a group of assembly district leaders, who serve as members of the party's state committee and may also serve as members of the party's executive county committee. 3 Although there is some variation between parties and counties, typically two district leaders—one male, one female—are elected from each assembly district within the county, so the party's network is spread throughout the region. See N.Y. Elec. L. §§ 2-102, -104; Rules of Democratic Party of the State of New York, art. II, §§ 1-2; Rules of the New York Republican State Committee § 1; Rules and Regs. of the Democratic Party of the County of New York, art. II, §§ 1-4; art. III, § 1. We refer to candidates backed by a party's county leaders as party-backed candidates. 47 This party leadership recruits judicial delegate candidates, alternate candidates, and petition circulators. The party then simply includes its delegate candidates on the omnibus designating petitions it circulates during every primary election cycle, which may include candidates for the State Legislature, lower courts, and even Congress. In that way, the party leadership ensures that its group of loyal, hand-picked delegate candidates achieves ballot status as a matter of course. 48 Defendants' own expert witness, New York City Board of Elections Commissioner Douglas Kellner, testified that the primary system is designed to produce this remarkable disparity between individual candidates' and party-backed candidates' ability to compete. Kellner certainly is in a position to know. He served as Law Chair of the New York County Democratic Party, has attended every judicial nominating convention of the Democratic Party in the First Judicial District since 1976, and often operated as the county leader's right-hand man at those conventions. According to Kellner, regardless of the fact that the electoral scheme ostensibly provides for an open primary election, the idea that an individual candidate would go out and recruit delegate candidates and run delegates pledged to that candidate in the primary is not the system and it twists the design of the system on its head. 49 The process of running a slate of delegates on the primary election ballot is so beset with obstacles that nearly all candidates recognize the attempt as a fool's errand and do not even try. In the normal course, only one slate of delegates—that supported by local party leadership—even files a designating petition. The uncontested slate is then deemed elected by operation of law and does not appear on the primary ballot. This kind of invisible, automatic election is the norm rather than the exception. Between the years 1999 and 2002, four of the State's counties—Albany, Nassau, Suffolk, and Tompkins—did not field one single contested delegate race in any of their assembly districts. 50 In New York City, the situation is only slightly improved. Between 1999 and 2003 in the First, Second, Eleventh, and Twelfth Judicial Districts, only 12.7 percent of delegate elections were contested, and these contested races occurred only in portions of the judicial districts. Accordingly, in 87.3 percent of delegate races over that four-year period, voters did not even see the delegates' names on the ballot, much less have the opportunity to vote them up or down.