Pandemic does not excuse late Election Law filing (Matter of Seawright v. NYC BOE / Matter of Hawatmeh v. NYS BOE).

As we explained in our case summaries (here and here), the question in these cases was 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 a consolidated decision resolving both appeals (as well as two other appeals in which leave had been granted), the Court (per curiam) held that the late filing was in fact a fatal defect requiring disqualification.

These appeals involved two candidates for office: Rebecca Seawright, who planned to run for a New York Assembly seat; and Ola Hawatmeh, who planed to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Under the ordinary deadlines set by the Election Law and local regulations, Seawright’s and Hawatmeh’s paperwork qualifying them for the June 2020 primary elections would have been due in early April. Because the paperwork required obtaining signatures on petitions, the process risked exposing people to cornovarius. The Legislature sought to minimize that risk by reducing the number of signatures required and by shortening the deadline to file the required paperwork. Seawright and Hawatmeh both allegedly missed the shortened deadline—Seawright because she was suffering from coronavirus, and Hawatmeh because she was out of state for cancer treatment.

The majority held that the candidates’ failure to file their forms by the statutory deadlines disqualifies them from the June primary. In the majority’s view, compliance with statutory filing deadlines is strictly enforced. A contrary ruling, the majority held, would “dilute the integrity of the election process and jeopardize enforcement of the mandatory filing requirements set forth in the Election Law,” in violation of settled precedent. Although the Court recognized that Seawright and Hawatmeh were sick when the filing deadlines elapsed, it noted that the candidates’ agents could have filed the paperwork on the candidates’ behalf. The candidates could have also had their paperwork notarized electronically. Finally, the Court observed that “more than 1,000 designating petitions were timely and properly filed in New York City alone—including by candidates experiencing the same challenges as” Seawright and Hawatmeh.

Judge Rivera dissented in an opinion joined by Judge Wilson. She believed that the majority had “slavishly adhered” to the statutory text while blinding itself to legislative intent—protecting New Yorkers from coronavirus. That intent was served, Judge Rivera explained, by encouraging sick people to remain at home, just as Seawright and Hawatmeh had and as the Legislature and Governor had mandated. And she distinguished the cases the majority cited for the proposition that failure to timely file paperwork is fatal: those cases involved “a candidate’s careless or inadvertent failure to follow the mandate of statute and case law.” Seawright and Hawatmeh, in contrast, acted “in accordance with governmental guidance during a highly unusual and unprecedented pandemic.”

Judge Wilson also penned a separate dissent. He believed that the majority erred in two ways:

First, the majority should have rescinded its leave grants upon determining that the case was dictated by settled precedent. As Judge Wilson observed, the Court of Appeals annually “turn[s] away hundreds of cases because, in [its] judgment, deciding them would have no significant statewide import,” even though the result in “[i]n many of those cases . . . is wrong, unfair or questionable.”

Second, the majority should not have held that Seawright and Hawatmeh were disqualified from the June primaries. As to Seawright, Judge Wilson cited the Election Law’s statement that designating petitions should be “liberally construed, not inconsistent with substantial compliance thereto and the prevention of fraud,” and noted that Seawright had substantially complied with the law by filing “many forms” and omitting “just two pieces of paper”—a cover sheet and a certificate of acceptance. And even those two pieces of paper, Judge Wilson noted, were filed soon after the deadline. As to Hawatmeh, Judge Wilson believed that her forms were timely. He explained that under the statute, a certificate of acceptance—the document that Hawatmeh allegedly filed late—is timely for candidates outside New York City if received by March 26. The majority had held Hawatmeh to a March 24 deadline—without explaining why that deadline applied—but as Judge Wilson noted, that deadline applies only to candidates in New York City.