Haggerty filed a similar lawsuit in 2005 and lost.

So, I wondered, how is this different?

“That’s actually a good question,” Haggerty told me when I reached him just now.

“The last lawsuit didn’t include an adoption of rules,” he said. “They essentially had the same rules in 2003 that they did in 2005.”

This year, “They did not engage in mass disqualifications the way that Serph [Maltese] did in 2005. They opted for different methods of affecting the outcome,” Haggerty said. That change, he said, was not announcing in advance the new rules used to count the votes.

It’s sort of complicated, but this local paper has a good over view of vote in question.

The fact the suit was filed in Albany is also interesting, since the judges there shouldn't have too much of a connection to the local activists on either side of the case.