Rockland County Election Lawsuit: Allegations, Dismissal, and Appeal

The Rockland County election lawsuit, filed by the nonprofit SMART Legislation to challenge the county’s 2024 presidential and U.S. Senate results, was dismissed on December 16, 2025, by State Supreme Court Justice Rachel Tanguay, who ruled the plaintiff lacked standing. SMART Legislation filed an appeal on December 31, 2025.¹²

Who Sued and What They Wanted

SMART Legislation is the policy-advocacy arm of SMART Elections, a Brooklyn-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded by journalist Lulu Friesdat that focuses on election security and voting-system integrity.³ The complaint was filed in December 2024 in Rockland County Supreme Court. Original plaintiffs included SMART Legislation, independent U.S. Senate candidate Diane Sare (who ran on the “LaRouche” ballot line and leads the LaRouche Organization), and two individual voters.⁴

The suit asked the court to order a full hand recount of every presidential and Senate ballot cast in the county, invalidate the certified results, order a special election, and appoint a court monitor to oversee future election procedures.⁵

The Allegations

The plaintiffs built their case on three types of claims.

The first involved sworn affidavits. In Assembly District 39, nine voters signed affidavits saying they had voted for Diane Sare, while the Board of Elections recorded only five Sare votes. In Assembly District 62, five affidavits corresponded to three recorded votes. Sare reportedly collected the affidavits herself.⁴

The second was statistical. Democratic Senate candidate Kirsten Gillibrand won Rockland County by roughly 8,000 votes; Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris lost the county to Donald Trump by more than 17,000. The complaint pointed to districts where voters chose Gillibrand but Harris received zero votes.⁶ Statistician Max Bonamente, retained by the plaintiffs, concluded that the 2024 presidential results were “statistically highly unlikely” in four of the county’s five towns when compared with 2020.⁷

The third involved the voting machines themselves. The complaint questioned a software update, designated ECO-1188, that was applied to Election Systems & Software (ES&S) equipment before the election. The testing laboratory Pro V&V classified the update as “de minimis,” requiring no additional testing; a technical advisor consulted by SMART Elections called it “a major change” affecting “the cryptography keys and identity assurance of the device.”⁷ The suit also raised more speculative theories involving uninterruptible power supply devices as hacking vectors, Starlink connections, and a Palantir AI system allegedly used to hide tampering.⁸

How Election Experts Responded

MIT political science professor Charles Stewart III analyzed precinct-level data and found “no signs of errors or manipulation,” calling the case a “nothingburger.” The patterns the plaintiffs flagged were concentrated in Ramapo, home to large Orthodox Jewish communities where bloc voting regularly produces lopsided results across different offices.⁶ Stewart noted that Haredi communities in neighboring Orange County, which uses Dominion equipment rather than ES&S, showed similar ticket-splitting, undercutting the theory that ES&S software drove the Gillibrand-Harris gap.⁹

Verified Voting, a nonpartisan election-security group, published a rebuttal in July 2025. Board advisor Kevin Skoglund evaluated six specific claims and found “no credible evidence of hacking or large-scale fraud,” describing the UPS, Starlink, and AI theories as “technically incoherent.” Verified Voting acknowledged that the Sare affidavit discrepancy could reflect a small counting error but noted the margin was far too small to change any outcome.⁸

Federal certification records describe the ECO-1188 change as reclassifying a configuration file from “semi-static” to “dynamic” so that hash-verification results would match across installations. Pro V&V performed a source code review, documentation review, trusted build, and limited functional testing, and concluded the modification did not affect functionality, security, or vote-counting logic.¹⁰ SMART Elections disputed Stewart’s methodology, arguing that his analysis ignored high vote drop-off rates in four non-Hasidic Rockland towns.⁹

How the Case Moved Through Court

In March 2025, Justice Tanguay dismissed most of the plaintiffs’ requests, including the demands to invalidate the certified results, hold a special election, and install a court monitor. She kept the hand-recount request alive and allowed discovery to proceed.⁷⁶

The plaintiffs served 15 pages of discovery requests covering voting machine hardware and software, forensic hard-drive copies, chain-of-custody procedures, password protocols, vendor contracts, and communications with ES&S and Pro V&V.⁷ Over the same period, Diane Sare and the two individual voters withdrew, leaving SMART Legislation as the sole plaintiff.¹¹

Rockland County moved to dismiss and sought a stay of discovery. County Attorney Thomas Humbach said the claim had “no merit” and that “the petitioners do not qualify for a recount as a matter of law.”⁷ Republican Elections Commissioner Patricia Giblin said the Board had “thoroughly reviewed the results and confirmed no irregularities, fraud or hacking.”⁵

Why the Case Was Dismissed

Judge Tanguay’s December 16, 2025 ruling rested on standing. Once the candidate and voter plaintiffs withdrew, only the advocacy organization remained, and the court found it had failed to meet the legal requirements to bring the challenge.¹

The underlying recount law also worked against the plaintiffs. New York Election Law § 9-208 triggers an automatic full manual recount only when the margin is 20 votes or fewer, 0.5 percent or less, or under 5,000 votes in a contest with more than one million ballots cast.¹² The Rockland presidential and Senate margins fell far outside those thresholds.

Friesdat argued that the dismissal was procedural, not a ruling on the merits. She told News 12 the discovery process had produced “a tremendous amount of information” about how voting-machine passwords are handled and had surfaced “conflicting information” from election officials. The Board of Elections said it would “continue to administer and certify election results in accordance with all applicable laws and procedures.”¹

The Appeal

SMART Elections announced on December 31, 2025 that it had filed an appeal. Friesdat said the group had initially planned to conserve resources and let the ruling stand but reversed course after receiving what she described as “inside information” about possible “internal corruption” at the Rockland County Board of Elections. Starting over with a fresh lawsuit was not available, she noted, because New York election law requires such challenges to be filed within 30 days of an election.²

Why the Case Drew National Attention

The lawsuit stood out because election-fraud claims of this kind have more often come from the political right since 2020. Votebeat described a “growing appetite” for similar narratives on the left, citing a YouGov poll finding that 41 percent of 2024 Harris voters did not believe Trump had “legitimately won the election.”⁶

1
News 12 Hudson Valley. Judge Dismisses Rockland Election Results Lawsuit Seeking Recount of 2024 Results
2
SMART Elections Substack. Rockland County Lawsuit Appeal Filed
3
InfluenceWatch. SMART Elections
4
Ballot Access News. New York State Trial Court Allows Lawsuit on Accuracy of Rockland County 2024 Vote Count To Go Forward
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The Journal News (lohud.com). Lawsuit Claims Rockland Votes Miscounted in 2024 Election
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Votebeat. Rockland County Election Lawsuit Fans Election Mistrust
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Yahoo Finance (Newsweek). Voting Machine Details Requested in Lawsuit Challenging 2024 Election
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Verified Voting. What’s This Rumor About Rockland County
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SMART Elections Substack. Answering the Critics
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U.S. Election Assistance Commission. ECO Analysis ESS 1188
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Rockland County Business Journal. Lawsuit Challenging 2024 Election Results Highlights Irregularities Familiar to Rockland Voters
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New York State Senate. New York Election Law Section 9-208