A lawsuit questioning the accuracy of the 2024 election will go to trial early next year, a judge has said.
SMART Legislation, the action arm of the nonpartisan watchdog group SMART Elections, brought the lawsuit over voting discrepancies in Rockland County, New York.
Why It Matters
The lawsuit has brought the results of the 2024 election under scrutiny. However, as Congress has certified the results declaring President Donald Trump the winner, it won’t change the outcome.
Election integrity has become a concern for many Americans following Trump’s unsupported claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Ed Jones/AFP via Getty Images
What To Know
Last month, Judge Rachel Tanguay of the New York Supreme Court ruled that the allegations in the lawsuit were serious enough for discovery to proceed.
In an order filed on Wednesday, Tanguay said all discovery—where the involved parties exchange information and evidence relevant to the case—must be completed within 210 days, about seven months.
The order also said the plaintiffs “shall file Note of Issue and Trial Readiness Order” no later than eight months from now “unless otherwise directed by the court.”
According to the complaint, more voters have sworn in legal affidavits that they voted for independent U.S. Senate candidate Diane Sare than the Rockland County Board of Elections counted and certified, contradicting those results.
The complaint said at least nine votes must have been cast for Sare in District 39, with seven voters signing sworn statements saying they voted for her on Election Day, but the Rockland County Board of Elections recorded five votes.
The complaint also cited numerous statistical anomalies in the presidential election results.
They include multiple districts where hundreds of voters chose the Democratic candidate Kirsten Gillibrand for Senate, but none voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate for president.
The complaint said that in Rockland County, 9 percent of voters who voted for Gillibrand did not vote Harris, giving Harris a -9 percent drop-off rate.
“The difference in the drop-off rate between the Republican Presidential candidate and the Democratic Presidential candidate is in excess of 30 percent,” the complaint said. “A study conducted by researchers at Yale, Harvard, MIT and Columbia Universities found that split-ticket voting averaged between 1-2 percent in the 2020 election. Therefore, split-ticket voting seems a very unlikely explanation of the Rockland BOE data.”
What People Are Saying
Lulu Friesdat, the founder and executive director of SMART Legislation, said in a statement: “There is clear evidence that the Senate results are incorrect, and there are statistical indications that the presidential results are highly unlikely.
“If the results are incorrect, it is a violation of the constitutional rights of each person who voted in the 2024 Rockland County general election. The best way to determine if the results are correct is to examine the paper ballots in a full public, transparent hand recount of all presidential and Senate ballots in Rockland County. We believe it’s vitally important, especially in the current environment, to be absolutely confident about the results of the election.”
Max Bonamente, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the author of Statistics and Analysis of Scientific Data, said in a paper on the voting data from Rockland County: “These data would require extreme sociological or political causes for their explanation, and would benefit from further assurances as to their fidelity.”
Costas Panagopoulos, a professor of political science at Northeastern University, previously told Newsweek: “Statistical irregularities in elections should always be investigated, but the sources of such inconsistencies, which can include error or miscalculation, are not always nefarious. Still, scrutinizing election results can strengthen confidence in elections. Mistakes can happen.
“In this case, the drop-off inconsistencies could reflect the idiosyncratic nature of the 2024 presidential election cycle. Alone, statistical comparisons to previous cycles cannot provide definitive proof of wrongdoing.
“In any case, it does not appear that any of these inconsistencies would be sufficient to change the outcomes of any of the elections in question in New York state. That does not mean they should not be scrutinized, and any errors, if verified, should be corrected for the historical record. But there is not necessarily any need to invalidate any of these elections in these jurisdictions.”
What Happens Next
The lawsuit is seeking a full hand recount of ballots cast in the presidential and U.S. Senate races in Rockland County. A hearing has been scheduled for September 22.
