The US District Court for the Southern District of New York Friday denied injunctive relief and granted motion for summary judgement in a lawsuit brought on by 12 plaintiffs from Israel who were denied voter registration in New York for missing the October 9th postmark deadline.

The complaint was brought by a dozen US citizens who reside in Israel and attempted to vote in New York under a “Special Federal Voter” state law. §11-202(1) of the NY state election law allows a special federal voter to vote if their application is “received by the state board of elections or any local board of elections on or before the twenty-fifth day next preceding any election in which such person would be entitled to vote.” The plaintiffs were required to submit Federal Post Card Application (FPCA) forms to register as overseas voters and to apply for absentee ballot. On September 18, 2020, Israel entered a mandatory lockdown due to COVID-19 and the plaintiffs could not leave their homes to visit a post office. Therefore, they emailed their FPCA forms between October 10-14th relying on the “twenty-fifth day” language in the statute to mean they could email their forms by October 14th.

Judge Lorna Schofield concluded that the plaintiffs misread the NY state election laws. According to her decision, §5-210(3) of the state law required completed application forms to be “received no later than the twentieth day before such election” which would be October 9th. The court found that the plaintiff’s constitutional violation claims were unfounded because New York is “certainly justified in imposing some reasonable cutoff point for registration or party enrollment, which citizens much meet in order to participate in the next election.”

Judge Schofield agreed that the Plaintiff’s “confusion does not mean that their misperception is widespread and that the Deadline Provision, and the statutory scheme of it is a part, promote widespread voter disenfranchisement.”