Republicans urge Supreme Court to restore New York congressional map

A Republican member of Congress, a group of voters, and New York election officials asked the Supreme Court to allow the state to proceed with the 2026 elections using its existing congressional map. This followed an order by a state court barring New York from using the map, and requiring the state to redraw the map because, according to the state court, it diluted the votes of Blacks and Latinos in the only congressional district in New York City represented by a Republican, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis. Malliotakis told the justices that the state court’s decision would require the state “to adopt an unconstitutional racial gerrymander” – that is, to sort voters based on race. Peter Kosinski, a Republican co-chair of the state’s board of elections, echoed Malliotakis’ concerns, telling the court that if it does not put the lower court’s ruling on hold “by February 23, 2026, New York’s congressional elections will be thrown into chaos and uncertainty.”

The district at the center of the dispute is New York’s 11th Congressional District, which is based on Staten Island but also extends into parts of southern Brooklyn. In October 2025, a group of voters went to state court, where they argued that the district’s boundaries violated the state’s constitution by diluting the votes of Black and Latino voters, who now make up approximately 30% of the population of Staten Island, while the population of white voters has dropped to 56%. Specifically, they contended, the district’s boundaries did not give its black and Latino residents an equal opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.

On Jan. 21, 2026, Justice Jeffrey Pearlman of the New York State Supreme Court – a trial court – agreed that the current map diluted minority votes in violation of the New York constitution, and he prohibited the state from using the map in upcoming elections. He also instructed the state’s independent redistricting commission to complete a new map by Feb. 6.

Malliotakis, who had joined the lawsuit to defend the current map, and Kosinski, asked two different state appeals courts to pause Pearlman’s ruling. The New York Court of Appeals, that state’s highest court, ruled that it lacked the ability to hear the case; the intermediate appellate court has not yet acted on their request. Under state law, the appeal also automatically put the portion of Pearlman’s order directing the creation of a new map by the redistricting commission on hold.   

In filings distributed to reporters on Friday, Malliotakis and Kosinski then came to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to intervene. Malliotakis argued that Pearlman’s “decision clearly violates this Court’s Equal Protection Clause case law by prohibiting New York from running any congressional elections until it racially gerrymanders CD11 by ‘adding [enough] Black and Latino voters from elsewhere,’ until the Black and Latino voters in CD11 control contested primaries and win most general elections.”

Kosinski contended that in reaching his decision, Pearlman had “adopted an entirely new standard for vote dilution claims” that had been advanced in a “friend of the court” brief rather than by the litigants. “As a matter of due process,” he wrote, “the trial court cannot reject the only standard litigated by the parties” – which derived from the New York Voting Rights Act – “and adopt something wholly new”: a “novel three-prong standard” that would require map makers to add minority voters from elsewhere so that (1) minority voters can select their preferred candidates in the primary election; (2) those candidates will usually win the general election; and (3) the newly redrawn district increases the influence of minority voters so that they play a decisive role in the selection of candidates. Moreover, he added, “[a]t this point it is impossible for the IRC to propose a new map, and for the Legislature to adopt any such map, in time for petitioning to start on February 24, 2026.”

The Trump administration filed a “friend of the court” brief supporting the requests to block the trial court’s ruling. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer contended that, unlike recent redistricting disputes that have come to the Supreme Court from California and Texas, involving “thorny questions about the relationship between partisan and racial gerrymandering … as States race to redraw their electoral maps before the 2026 midterms,” this case presents “an open and unabashed racial gerrymander,” thereby violating the equal protection clause of the Constitution.  

The court has directed the voters challenging the current map to respond to the requests by Malliotakis and Kosinski by Thursday, Feb. 19, at 4 p.m. EST.