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New York Times – Howard Leib, a 53-year-old entertainment lawyer, is considering a run for the New York State Senate this year.

But Mr. Leib, a Democrat from the Finger Lakes region, has an unexpected first challenge: he does not know what district he lives in.

Even at a time when many states have faced controversy and litigation over redrawing political lines, New York stands out. It is one of the last states in the nation to move forward with the decennial redistricting process, creating an enormous advantage for the already advantaged incumbents in Congress and the State Legislature.

Over the last decade in New York, incumbents who have sought re-election to Albany have won their races 96 percent of the time, with an average margin of victory of 61 percentage points, according to a recent study by Citizens Union, a government watchdog group.

And as states from California to Massachusetts experiment with new ways to draw political districts that are based less on the needs of incumbents, New York’s process is being led entirely by insiders.

“We can see what the outcome’s going to be here; it’s the same as it has been for over 50 years,” said State Senator Martin Malavé Dilan of Brooklyn, the Senate Democrats’ representative on the Legislature’s redistricting task force, declaring the entire exercise to be “a farce and a waste of time and money.”

Mr. Leib, whose home is currently located in a seven-county district with a gerrymandered shape that has been compared to Abraham Lincoln riding a vacuum cleaner, said he could not decide whether to run, where to campaign or from whom to raise money without knowing what district his house would be in after new maps were drawn.

The senator from his current district, James L. Seward, a Republican who was first elected in 1986, did not face a challenger in the last election, and Mr. Leib does not want him to run unopposed again.

“I’m in a holding pattern,” said Mr. Leib, who is suing to challenge the state’s redistricting process. “In the meantime, the clock ticks away, which gives the incumbent a huge advantage because he’s got an organization in place.”

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who unsuccessfully urged the Legislature to allow an independent commission to draw the new maps, offered the same assessment last week, saying in an interview that “the challenger loses in the sprint.”

New York’s political establishment is being roiled by the closed-door map-making. The same legislative task force handles the redistricting at the state and federal levels, and at least half a dozen members of New York’s Congressional delegation have hired Albany lobbyists to represent them.

The task force plans to release a proposed set of new maps for the Legislature this week, but has not even begun to draw new maps for Congress. The number of Congressional districts must be reduced to 27, from 29, because New York’s population grew more slowlythan other states’ in the 2010 census.

The conventional wisdom is that lawmakers will propose to carve up one Congressional district currently held by a Democrat and one held by a Republican. Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, a Democrat in his 10th term, announced last week that he would not seek re-election, making it more likely that lawmakers will propose to carve up his district, which stretches from Ithaca to Poughkeepsie.

Among the Republican districts most often discussed as candidates for elimination are those held by Bob Turner, who won a special election in September to represent parts of Queens and Brooklyn, and by Ann Marie Buerkle, who was elected in 2010 to represent the Syracuse area.

Even as lawmakers are reducing the number of Congressional districts, they are proposing to increase the number of districts in the State Senate, to 63 from 62, in a move Republicans say is required by a convoluted formula in the state’s Constitution, but which Democrats say is a ploy by the Republicans to improve their chances of keeping a majority.

Last week, a group of black pastors from the New York City area wrote Mr. Cuomo with concerns about how minority neighborhoods would be treated by redistricting, urging the governor “to stand up for the rights of every voter by not letting incumbent protection and silly political games outweigh community unity.”

A member of the rap group Das Racist has released a mixtape to raise awareness of gerrymandering of legislative districts in Queens. And Fordham University sponsored a contest in which it challenged students to draw fair redistricting plans using open-source computer software.

Several groups representing minority voters said they were less interested in the process than in the results but were already prepared to seek legal redress if the new district lines did not help their growing communities.

“Our goal is fair and meaningful representation,” said Glenn D. Magpantay, the director of the democracy program at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, which is seeking an increase in the number of Assembly districts that are largely Asian-American to four, from one. The group is also advocating the drawing of another such district, in the Flushing and Bayside sections of Queens, for the Senate.

“If the political process gets us there, great,” Mr. Magpantay said. “If litigation gets us there, great. If we knew that an independent redistricting commission got us there, that’d be great, too.”

The redistricting process in New York has long been derided by government watchdog groups and minority-party lawmakers as a backroom ritual aimed at easing re-election for the traditional majority parties in Albany: the Republicans in the Senate and the Democrats in the Assembly. And this year, the process is complicated by a lawsuit between the federal government and the state over New York’s election calendar, which could result in a state primary as early as June, rather than the usual September.

“With the calendar now at 2012, our options are unfortunately fewer,” said Dick Dadey, the executive director of Citizens Union.

Mr. Cuomo, a first-term Democrat, pledged during his campaign for governor to end the Legislature’s practice of drawing its own districts. In the interview, he repeated his long-held promise to veto any plan not drawn by an independent commission and predicted that, ultimately, the issue “will wind up in the courts, and the courts are going to determine if the maps were done fairly or not.”

Still, Mr. Cuomo acknowledged that because of the limited time until the next election, “in truth, something’s going to have to be worked out.”

Negotiations on a possible compromise have intensified in recent days, and people briefed on the matter said they expected an agreement could be reached as early as this week on a proposed amendment to the state’s Constitution that would overhaul the redistricting process for 2022.

But it remained uncertain whether a deal would include any changes to this year’s process. One idea under discussion is the creation of an impartial panel to review the maps being drawn by the task force, though the body would lack the authority of the independent commission that Mr. Cuomo had proposed.

Some advocates of an independent process professed to be leery of compromise.

“How do you know they’ll keep their word on a constitutional amendment?” said Edward I. Koch, the former New York mayor, who has been vociferously critical oflawmakers who have reneged on campaign pledges made in 2010 to support independent redistricting. “I worked too hard, put in an enormous amount of energy on this, and to have it end in a fizzle instead of with great success, I’m just not willing to roll over.”

The lawmakers in charge of redistricting defend their efforts, noting that the state’s Constitution makes the redrawing of legislative districts the responsibility of the Legislature.

“Frankly, the Constitution is an inconvenient truth for many who want to see it run roughshod,” State Senator Michael F. Nozzolio, a Seneca County Republican, said. “We are obeying the law.”

And Assemblyman John J. McEneny, an Albany Democrat, said he expected that “the vast majority of the districts will have no charges against them of gerrymandering.”

He added that the Supreme Court’s rejection on Friday of elections maps drawn by a federal court in Texas “reaffirms the legislative role in drawing up the maps as something that has to be taken seriously.”

But Mr. Cuomo said it was not realistic to expect lawmakers to do anything other than protect their own political interests.

“They will not draw lines that end their existence,” he said. “It’s against human nature.”

Thomas Kaplan for the New York Times

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