Judge John Gleeson
McMillan, the Rent Is 2 Damn High Party’s 2010 gubernatorial candidate, received 41,131 votes. To reach New York’s 50,000 vote threshold for official political party status, McMillan sued to compel the state Board of Elections to recount the 2010 ballots. The court dismissed McMillan’s complaint, deeming the board immune under the Eleventh Amendment. It further determined that McMillan failed to state a legally plausible claim on his other four contentions. As to his claim of religious bias arising from the board’s alleged antipathy to the word “damn” in McMillan’s chosen party name, the court noted that McMillan acknowledged that his dispute with the board over “damn” had been resolved in 2010. Nor did he support his claims that the board violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Nowhere in his complaint or court filings did McMillan suggest that any citizen’s right to vote was impeded on account of race or color. Noting a U.S. election Commission report detailing troubling findings about the operation of a certain optical ballot scanning machine, the court rejected McMillan’s claim that ballots may not have been counted because the word “High” in the party’s name was printed in the ballot’s “No Print Zone.”
