New York enacted new State Assembly district boundaries on April 24, 2023, when Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed legislation establishing them for use starting with the 2024 elections. The State Assembly passed the bill earlier that day by a vote of 132-13, and it passed the state Senate by a vote of 59-1. The New York State Independent Redistricting Commission (IRC) had voted 9-1 on April 20, 2023, to advance this plan and submit it to the legislature. The Commission stated in its cover letter that the plan “garnered the highest number of votes in support” at its meeting on that date.
According to Giulia Heyward and Jon Campbell at Gothamist, the new districts replaced “a nearly identical set of districts that were just put into place for last year’s races before a court threw them out.” Heyward and Campbell also wrote, “The commission had originally put forward a draft that would have made considerable changes before settling on a revised proposal last week mirroring the lines already in place.” In the 2022 elections for state Assembly, Democrats won 102 districts, and Republicans won 48.
The state redrew its Assembly district boundaries in response to a 2022 decision by the New York Supreme Court appellate division in Nichols v. Hochul. That court upheld a lower court ruling declaring the state’s Assembly district boundaries invalid. However, it determined that the boundaries should still be used for the 2022 legislative elections since the lawsuit challenging them was filed too close to those elections for the courts to intervene. The appellate division ruling determined that the Assembly district map was enacted in violation of the state’s constitutional redistricting process and ordered a New York City-based state trial court to oversee the redrawing of boundaries for the 2024 elections. On September 29, 2022, that trial court directed the IRC to “initiate the constitutional process for amending the assembly district map based on the 2020 census data by formulating a proposed assembly map” and submit such a plan to the legislature by April 28, 2023.
