The question in this case is whether, under emergency deadlines created as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, a potential candidate’s late filing of a document with election officials was a fatal defect that required disqualifying the candidate from the 2020 primary election.
In New York, a designating petition must be filed for each candidate who seeks to run in a party primary election. After a designating petition is filed, the candidate must accept or decline the party’s designation by filing a certificate of acceptance. The Election Law establishes deadlines for these filings. Under normal conditions, designating petitions were due between March 30 and April 2, 2020, and certificates of acceptance were due four days after that period ended, by April 6, 2020.
But conditions this year are anything but normal. In response to the coronavirus pandemic, on March 18, 2020, the Legislature enacted measures that truncated the primary election calendar. That legislation required that designating petitions be filed no later than March 20, and provided further that “the political calendar with respect to objections, acceptances, authorizations, declinations, substitutions and the last day to commence an election law article 16 proceeding shall be adjusted accordingly.” The adjusted deadline to file certificates of acceptance was thus March 24, 2020.
When candidates failed to comply with these deadlines, litigation to disqualify them raised the question of what should the consequences be for failing to comply with the adjusted election deadlines. Typically, a failure to timely file a designating petitioner or certificate of acceptance was deemed a “fatal defect.” But in a series of decisions, the departments of the Appellate Division split as to whether failure to comply withe adjusted deadlines should also be deemed “fatal.”
This is one of those cases. In this case, petitioner sought to run in the the Conservative Party primary for a congressional seat. A designating petition was timely filed, but petitioner’s certificate of acceptance was mailed one day late, on March 25, 2020. The State Board of Election determined that the designating petition was invalid because the certificate of acceptance was late, and Supreme Court confirmed that decision.
The Third Department affirmed. The court was “sympathetic to the difficult situation that petitioner was placed in due to the pandemic and the shortened political calendar.” But the court held that the deadlines in the Election Law were “mandatory and absolute” and courts were “without authority or discretion to fashion exceptions” to those deadlines “regardless of how compelling or reasonable they may appear to be.”
The Court of Appeals granted leave to appeal.
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