"Anomalies" in Rockland County, NY Voting Patterns Are Not Anomalies

The absence of votes for Kamala Harris in some Rockland County, NY precincts has a clear political explanation, and it's not voter fraud.

Rockland County, New York has found itself facing a lawsuit over the results of the 2024 general election. Two voters, a U.S. Senate candidate, and an election advocacy group alleged irregularities in the election results that, they claim, call into question not only Rockland County’s outcome but results across the country.

In response, local political observers have offered a straightforward explanation: the political preferences of certain religious communities in Ramapo, a town in the county, where voters declined to support Harris despite backing Democratic Senate candidate Kirsten Gillibrand.

Election results in Palm Tree, New York, in neighboring Orange County, support the idea that some Haredi voters supported Gillibrand while largely withholding support from Harris. Palm Tree, which is coterminous with the village of Kiryas Joel, shows a voting pattern nearly identical to that in the predominantly Haredi areas of Ramapo.

Before proceeding to analyze Palm Tree’s results, let’s return to voting patterns in Rockland County. According to the complaint, Rockland County exhibited two significant anomalies. First, Diane Sare, a U.S. Senate candidate running under the LaRouche Party label, claimed that more people voted for her than the official election returns reflected. Her allegation of stolen votes relied on affidavits from a few Rockland County voters, including Sare herself. (The official returns reported 397 votes for Sare in Rockland County, compared to 72,003 for Gillibrand and 64,082 for the Republican, Michael D. Sapraicone. Sare received 39,421 votes statewide, out of nearly 8.4 million cast.)

Second, based on an analysis performed by the advocacy group SMART Elections, the lawsuit claims significant discrepancies between the number of votes cast for Gillibrand and those cast for Kamala Harris. (A parallel claim was made regarding the discrepancy between the vote totals for Sapraicone and Donald Trump.)

I will set aside the claims about Sare’s allegedly missing Senate votes—the number is small, and such affidavits are inherently unverifiable. Instead, I focus on Harris’s underperformance relative to Gillibrand, as it involves more votes.

It is true that Harris significantly underperformed Gillibrand in Rockland County when compared to the rest of the state. Statewide, Gillibrand received 59% of the vote, while Harris received 56%, a three-point gap. In Rockland County, Gillibrand received 53% and Harris 44%, producing a nine-point difference.

Drilling down further in Rockland County, the town of Ramapo emerges as the center of this discrepancy. Gillibrand earned 50% of the Senate vote in Ramapo, compared to Harris’s 32%—an 18-point gap.¹ In the rest of the county, the margin was just three points—53% for Gillibrand vs. 50% for Harris.

Examining Ramapo’s election returns more closely, the most dramatic differences between Gillibrand and Harris are concentrated in a small number of precincts. A typical difference between the two candidates at the precinct level ranges from 3 to 10 points. However, in 10 precincts, the gap exceeds 40 points: precincts 21, 35, 55, 95, 97, 98, 109, 111, 117, and 118.

Where are these precincts? See the highlighted sections on the Ramapo electoral district map below. I have also marked the locations of two villages in Ramapo—Kaser and New Square. According to the 2015 American Community Survey, over 89% of households in these two villages spoke Yiddish at home. This is in contrast with 16% of the rest of the town.

This voting pattern made me wonder whether it occurred elsewhere in New York. It did.

This takes us to Orange County, New York, home to Kiryas Joel, a Haredi community involved in longstanding disputes over public services with neighboring jurisdictions. In Palm Tree, the town coterminous with Kiryas Joel, Gillibrand received 86% of the Senate vote, while Harris received just 2%. In the rest of Orange County, Gillibrand received 51% vs. 48% for Harris.

There’s one last issue to address in the Rockland County controversy. Some have linked the vote discrepancies to a claim that a de minimis pre-election update to ES&S voting machines contributed to tabulation errors. Rockland County uses ES&S equipment; Orange County doesn’t. The claim that this minor software patch to voting machines could have facilitated a targeted manipulation of votes in New York (and elsewhere?) is implausible on its face. The fact that Orange County uses a different voting equipment manufacturer should put to rest the idea that these discrepancies were due to software upgrades.

If I were one to editorialize, I would launch into a number of topics—starting with how the social media posterati glom onto fringe theories about election improprieties, and how legal proceedings in out-of-the-way jurisdictions can be amplified into national causes célèbres. I won’t say any more than this: the Rockland County election results in this case are a nothingburger.

(One last thing: for more information on the Rockland County controversy, check out the Snopes webpage on the topic.)

(A second last thing: Christopher Kenny has quite a detailed analysis of Rockland County here.) [Updated 6/23/25 at 11:03 a.m. EDT.]

1. This calculation is based on precinct-level election returns released by the county. To protect voter privacy, results from a small number of precincts—both within and outside Ramapo—were withheld from public release.