The question in these cases 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. Regulations require that any petition ten pages or longer must contain a cover sheet, but the Election Law allows candidates three business days to cure a failure to comply with this requirement. The Election Law establishes the deadline for filing a designating petition. Under normal conditions, they would have been due by April 2, 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.”
When candidates failed to comply with the adjusted deadlines, courts were asked to determine what consequences should flow from such a failure. Typically, a failure to timely file a required document 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.”
These are two of those cases. Petitioners are candidates who sought to run in the the Democratic Party primary. Designating petitions were timely filed, but petitioners failed to timely file coversheets. In two separate proceedings challenging the validity of the petitions, Supreme Court held that they were untimely and thus invalid.
The First Department reversed. The court held that petitioner’s belated filings were not a fatal defect “where the delay in filing is attributable to illness or quarantine because of the current COVID-19 pandemic.” The court emphasized that there was no allegation of fraud in connection with the designating petitions, there was no actual prejudice alleged as a result of petitioner’s belated filings, and the only alleged harm–harm to the Board’s administrative convenience–“cannot outweigh the right to ballot access in the current unique circumstances.”
The Court of Appeals granted leave to appeal.
Return to the case page for Matter of Mujumder v. New York City Board of Elections or Matter of Mejia v. New York City Board of Elections.