New York moves to erase anti-gerrymandering ban ahead of 2028

New York Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins introduced S.10637/A.11553 on the night of June 1, 2026. The constitutional amendment erases the New York Constitution's explicit prohibition on drawing districts that favor political parties or incumbents, and authorizes the legislature to redistrict congressional seats mid-decade without waiting for the next census. Lawmakers planned a floor vote for June 4, the final day of the regular 2026 session.

The amendment's most significant structural change: it reduces the vote threshold needed to approve maps from a two-thirds supermajority to a simple majority. Democrats control both the Assembly (100 of 150 seats) and Senate (41 of 63 seats), meaning they can pass maps without a single Republican vote. Under the old rules, the two-thirds threshold was the only structural brake on a single party drawing lines entirely to its own benefit.

New York's current redistrictingRedistrictingThe process of redrawing congressional and state legislative district boundaries, typically every 10 years after the Census, to equalize populations.Key ConceptRedistrictingThe process of redrawing congressional and state legislative district boundaries, typically every 10 years after the Census, to equalize populations.Open conceptBookmark rules trace to a 2014 constitutional amendment that created the bipartisan Independent Redistricting Commission and for the first time wrote anti-gerrymandering protections directly into the state constitution. New York voters approved Proposal 1 by a 57.7-to-42.3% margin on November 4, 2014, after the legislature passed it in two successive sessions in 2012 and 2013. Gov. Andrew Cuomo called it a permanent end to self-interested partisan gerrymanderingPartisan GerrymanderingDrawing district lines to advantage one political party, which federal courts cannot review since Rucho v. Common Cause (2019).Key ConceptPartisan GerrymanderingDrawing district lines to advantage one political party, which federal courts cannot review since Rucho v. Common Cause (2019).Open conceptBookmark.

The 2026 amendment strips out those anti-gerrymandering criteria — the ban on drawing districts that favor political parties, incumbents, or that discourage competition — while keeping the IRC in place to hold hearings and produce one set of proposed maps by January 15 in the second year of each decade. If the IRC deadlocks again, the legislature can draw maps itself by simple majority, and courts lose the power to order maps drawn from scratch.

The backdrop to the 2026 amendment is a decades-long pattern of New York congressional seat loss. New York sent 45 representatives to Congress after the 1940 census — the most of any state. It lost one seat after the 1950 census, two after 1960, two after 1970, five after 1980, three after 1990, two after 2000, two after 2010, and one more after the 2020 census — leaving the state with 26 seats. The 2020 loss was decided by a margin of just 89 people: if 89 additional New York residents had been counted, the state would have retained all 27 seats. Every lost seat compounds Democrats' need to maximize their map advantage in the remaining ones.

The redistricting battle in New York grew directly from decisions made in other states. In July 2025, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called a special legislative session and redrew the state's congressional map at the urging of President Trump, producing five new Republican-leaning seats ahead of the 2026 midterms. That decision broke a post-WWII norm of once-per-decade redistricting. By June 2026, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, California, Florida, and Tennessee had all enacted mid-decade congressional maps.

The precedent for mid-decade redistrictingMid-Decade RedistrictingRedrawing congressional district lines outside the standard post-Census cycle, normally conducted after each decennial census in years ending in 1.Key ConceptMid-Decade RedistrictingRedrawing congressional district lines outside the standard post-Census cycle, normally conducted after each decennial census in years ending in 1.Open conceptBookmark traces back to 2003 Texas, when U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay pushed Texas Republicans — who had won full legislative control in 2002 — to replace a court-drawn map with a partisan one. The new map shifted Texas's congressional delegation from a 17-to-15 Democratic majority to a 21-to-11 Republican majority in a single cycle, a six-seat swing. Fifty-two Texas House Democrats fled to Oklahoma to break quorum and block the vote, but Gov. Rick Perry called a series of special sessions that eventually succeeded. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld most of the plan in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry (2006), ruling 7-to-2 that mid-decade redistricting is not prohibited by federal law — while striking down one district as a Voting RightsVoting RightsConstitutional and statutory protections guaranteeing citizens the right to register and vote without undue government barriers.Key ConceptVoting RightsConstitutional and statutory protections guaranteeing citizens the right to register and vote without undue government barriers.Open conceptBookmark Act violation.

The 2022 redistricting cycle scarred New York Democrats. The Democratic-controlled legislature drew congressional maps in early 2022 that would have eliminated several Republican-held seats. The New York Court of Appeals struck those maps down 4-to-3 in Harkenrider v. Hochul, finding them unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders drawn without following the required IRC process. The IRC had voted 5-to-5 and submitted competing proposals, and Democrats bypassed the required second-submission step to draw their own maps.

A special master appointed by an upstate Republican-appointed judge drew replacement maps. Under those maps, Republicans flipped three congressional seats in November 2022 — a shift that helped the GOP win narrow control of the U.S. House. Heastie's defense of the 2026 amendment includes a direct reference to that experience. "Asking New York to play fair while everybody else is playing ruthless, I think it's not fair to do," he told Spectrum News on June 2, 2026.

The 2026 amendment is also shaped by the federal legal landscape. In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-to-4 that federal courts may not limit partisan gerrymandering at all — leaving state constitutional provisions as the only judicial check on partisan map-drawing. The 2014 New York amendment's anti-gerrymandering language was one of those checks. Removing it eliminates the only remaining judicial backstop that courts could enforce against partisan maps in New York. Deputy Senate Majority Leader Mike Gianaris, who co-chairs LATFOR, called the Supreme Court's 2026 decision weakening the Voting Rights Act a "five-alarm fire" that altered the legal landscape and made the old anti-gerrymandering language untenable to maintain unilaterally.

The amendment sets a January 15, 2027, deadline for the IRC to submit new congressional district maps. If the IRC deadlocks again, the legislature may draw and pass its own maps by simple majority. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who holds veto power over any legislative-drawn map, supports the amendment. Jeffrey Wice, a redistricting expert at New York Law School, said Democrats would target seats on Long Island, in New York City, and in the lower Hudson Valley. Of New York's 26 congressional seats, seven are held by Republicans. The most competitive seats include Rep. Mike Lawler's 17th District in the lower Hudson Valley — one of only three Republican-held seats that Kamala Harris won in 2024 — and two on Long Island held by Reps. Nick LaLota and Andrew Garbarino.

Because the amendment changes the state constitution, it can't take effect from a single legislative vote. New York's constitution requires the same amendment to pass a second time after the intervening election, then win majority approval from voters in a referendum. Democrats plan to pass the amendment again in 2027, after newly elected legislators take their seats. The earliest a voter referendum could appear on the ballot is November 2027.

In 2021, New York voters rejected a separate proposed constitutional amendment that would have made narrower reforms to the redistricting process without touching the anti-gerrymandering language, 53-to-47%. That defeat is informing how Democrats frame the 2026 measure for a 2027 referendum campaign.

Republican and good-government critics responded immediately. Assembly Minority Leader Ed Ra called the amendment "wrong for New Yorkers" and pledged to campaign against it in the 2027 referendum. Rep. Mike Lawler accused Democrats of hypocrisy, pointing to the 2022 court defeat. Reinvent Albany senior policy advisor Rachael Fauss said, "We fundamentally don't think that New York is going to save American democracy by gerrymandering." An April 2026 poll found 69% of Republicans, 70% of independents, and 74% of Democrats oppose states drawing congressional districts that intentionally favor one party — creating a significant political risk for the 2027 referendum campaign.