A federal judge just ordered New York election officials to restore Bernie Sanders to the presidential primary ballot

• A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the New York Board of Elections must hold a presidential primary election and restore Sen. Bernie Sanders to the ballot.
• In an unprecedented move, New York canceled its Democratic presidential primary, which was originally scheduled for June 23, amid the coronavirus pandemic.
• New York District Court Judge Analisa Torres ordered that New York must hold a presidential primary including all 10 candidates who qualified, in response to a lawsuit from former presidential candidate Andrew Yang.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the New York Board of Elections must hold a presidential primary election and restore Sen. Bernie Sanders and all other presidential candidates who qualified to the ballot.

In an unprecedented move, New York canceled its Democratic presidential primary, which was originally scheduled for June 23, amid the coronavirus pandemic.

New York District Court Judge Analisa Torres ordered that New York must hold a presidential primary including all 10 presidential candidates who qualified for the ballot, in response to a lawsuit from former presidential candidate Andrew Yang and a number of New Yorkers who planned to attend the 2020 Democratic convention as delegates.

The Board of Elections cited the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the dangers to in-person voting it poses in making the decision to cancel the primary. While dozens of states have postponed their primaries, New York is the only state who tried to cancel theirs.

While Sanders dropped out of the presidential primary on April 8, he is continuing to stay on the ballot for the rest of the primary cycle and earn delegates towards the convention.

"That has effectively ended the real contest for the presidential nomination," New York State Board of Elections Co-Chair Douglas Kellner said in justifying the board's decision to cancel the primary. "And what the Sanders supporters want is essentially a beauty contest that, given the situation with the public health emergency that exists now, seems to be unnecessary and, indeed, frivolous."

While New York law requires voters to have a documented excuse to vote absentee, Cuomo essentially waived the requirement by issuing an executive order that adds the risk of getting COVID-19 as a valid excuse.

Cuomo also recently announced that the state would send absentee-ballot applications with prepaid postage to registered voters to make it easy as possible for New Yorkers to vote from home.

Sanders supporters argued that it made no sense for New York to cancel its primary given that the state is continuing to hold dozens of congressional and state-level primaries and is enacting no-excuse absentee voting for the June election.

Judge Torres also agreed that canceling the primary would only marginally benefit public health.

"In sum, removing Yang, Sanders, and other candidates from the Democratic primary ballot will protect the public from COVID-19 only to a limited extent," Judge Torres wrote in her decision. "But barring Plaintiffs and Plaintiff-Intervenors from participating in an election for party delegates will sharply curtail their associational rights."

In addition to formally selecting a presidential nominee, Democrats convene several important committees at the convention to vote on the party's official platform and policy priorities.

For Sanders and his representatives to have a spot on any of those powerful committees, he needs to earn 25% of all pledged delegates allocated throughout the Democratic nomination process. And an inability to compete for any of New York's 274 delegates could be a big blow to his efforts.

Sanders' camp blasted the decision as undemocratic and unfair to voters, in addition to violating New York's own delegate selection plan. In an April 27 statement, senior Sanders advisor Jeff Weaver called the BOE's decision "an outrage," and "a blow to American democracy," noting that neither the DNC nor the Biden campaign requested the cancelation.

"Given that the primary is months away, the proper response must be to make the election safe – such as going to all vote by mail – rather than to eliminating people's right to vote completely," Weaver said, calling for New York to lose all its delegates if the Board doesn't allow Sanders on the ballot.

The Associated Press contributed reporting.

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