Two percent or two-thirds?

With help from Shawn Ness

Backroom negotiations and gamesmanship are in full throttle as New York’s new congressional plan heads toward a vote in the state Legislature next week.

As the process moves ahead, keep two key numbers in mind: 2 percent and two-thirds.

2 percent: If the Legislature votes down the maps proposed by the redistricting commission, it will be able to draw its own. But a statute proposed by ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2012 as lawmakers debated the constitutional amendment that created the commission limits how much legislators can change the lines in this scenario.

Each district can only differ by 2 percent from the ones drawn by the commission. So if there are 777,000 people in a congressional district, 761,000 of them would need to be the same in any plan drawn by the Legislature.

That means any new maps wouldn’t be drastically different from the commission’s — perhaps Republican Rep. Mike Lawler’s seat could be transformed from a district where Joe Biden received 55.1 percent of the vote into one where Biden received 55.3 percent of the vote. Some legislators don’t think it’s worth going through the rigamarole of voting down the lines just to get these tweaks.

That means Democrats who want an overhaul are left with two options. They could simply ignore the law and argue the bill containing the new maps implicitly supersedes it, but that would come with risks.

“If they draw a map that exceeds a 2 percent population change in any single district, that could open the door for a voter in an affected district to go to court,” said New York Law School’s Jeff Wice.

There’s no way of knowing what a court would decide, but there’s a chance such a suit “could result in the 2022 court map remaining in place,” Wice