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. 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. 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 filing a designating petition and certificate of acceptance. Under normal conditions, designating petitions were due by April 2, 2020, and certificates of acceptance were due four days later, on 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 the adjusted deadlines, litigation to invalidate their petitions queried what consequences should flow from a failure to comply with the adjusted election deadlines. 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.”
This is one of those cases. In this case, petitioner sought to run in the the Democratic Party and Working Families Party primary for a state Assembly seat. Designating petitions were timely filed, but petitioner filed her certificate of acceptance (for the Working Families Party petition) and her cover sheets (for the Democratic Party petition) on April 2, 2020–timely under the original deadlines but untimely under the adjusted ones. Petitioner noted that, at the time the deadlines were adjusted and expired, she was ill with COVID-19 and quarantined. The City Board of Election nevertheless invalidated petitioner’s designating petitions. But Supreme Court reversed that decision, finding that substantial, rather than strict, compliance was sufficient to meet the deadlines under the circumstances.
The First Department affirmed. The court held that petitioner’s belated filings were not a fatal defect given “the unique circumstances existing in New York City during the past few months, and the specific health challenges alleged here.” The court emphasized that there was no allegation of fraud in connection with petitioner’s 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.
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