By Mr. Brown
The ballot you pick up on November 3, or at early voting starting October 24, will include a section most Dutchess County voters skip entirely. Three seats on the New York State Supreme Court, 9th Judicial District. Five candidates listed. An instruction to vote for up to three.
Most voters have never heard of any of the five people on that list. Most have never had the race explained to them. The candidates themselves have done almost nothing to change that: as of mid-September 2026, four of the five had no campaign website. There are no official qualification ratings for judicial candidates anymore. The bar-association ratings that sometimes fill that gap were not found for any of these five.
The three winners will serve 14-year terms, handling serious cases across five counties.
This is the guide the race has not provided for itself.
First, What This Court Actually Is
The name is misleading. The New York State Supreme Court is not the state's top court. That is the Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court is New York's main trial court, the level at which felonies are tried, major civil cases are argued, and challenges to government decisions are heard. Justices serve 14-year terms.
The 9th Judicial District covers Dutchess, Putnam, Orange, Rockland and Westchester counties. Three of its seats are up for election this November.
Three Seats, Five Names, Vote for Up to Three
The ballot instruction is straightforward, but voters sometimes misread it. You may vote for up to three candidates. You do not have to choose three. If you find only one or two candidates you feel comfortable supporting, you can leave the remaining slots blank. That is a fully valid ballot.
The five candidates certified for this race are:
Maria G. Rosa - Democratic and Working Families lines
George E. Fufidio - Democratic and Republican lines
Alden H. Wolfe - Democratic and Conservative lines
Richard S. Fava Pastilha - Republican and Conservative lines
John Ciampoli - Republican line only
How These Candidates Got Here: The Convention System, Explained
The process that placed these five names on the November ballot is not widely understood, and it shapes what the race actually means.
New York has held no primary for Supreme Court. The system works like this. In June, voters in each Assembly district elect judicial delegates and alternates, a step that appears on the ballot but draws almost no attention. Those delegates then convene at a party convention for the judicial district. At that convention, party delegates nominate the candidates who will appear on the November ballot. The real choice, in other words, has already been made, months before Election Day, by a small group of delegates inside a convention hall.
This system dates to 1921. It survived a legal challenge when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it in New York State Board of Elections v. Lopez Torres, 552 U.S. 196 (2008). It remains New York law.
One consequence is that candidates who appeal to convention delegates advance; candidates who might appeal more broadly to a general primary electorate never get that contest. Another consequence, visible on this particular ballot, is cross-endorsement. New York permits a candidate to appear on multiple party lines. On this ballot, three of the five candidates carry lines from both a major party and a minor party, and Fufidio holds both the Democratic and the Republican lines. Votes cast for a candidate on any of their lines are combined in the final total.
Why There Is No Rating to Lean On
Voters accustomed to looking up official judicial ratings for guidance will not find any for the 2026 race. The Independent Judicial Election Qualification Commissions, which produced "qualified" or "not qualified" ratings for judicial candidates, ceased operations on December 31, 2018. No IJEQC ratings exist for any candidate running this year.
Bar-association ratings, a second common source of guidance, were not located by this desk for any of the five candidates. That is not a statement that no such ratings exist; it is an honest account of what searching the available sources produced.
What that leaves: the documented record of each candidate. For those who are sitting judges, that means bench tenure and any rulings in the public record. For those who are practicing lawyers without judicial experience, it means practice history and public roles.
The Five Candidates, One by One
Maria G. Rosa (Democratic and Working Families)
Rosa is the only sitting Supreme Court justice in this race and the only candidate from Dutchess County. She appears on the official court roster as a justice assigned to Dutchess County.
The documented record of her rulings includes a 2015 decision in Dutchess County in which she vacated a state Parole Board denial and ordered a new hearing. When the Parole Board re-issued a decision that legal commentators characterized as nearly identical to the one already rejected, Rosa initiated contempt proceedings in 2016. Legal observers described that sequence as an unusually assertive exercise of judicial authority against the state Parole Board. Those proceedings represent the publicly documented depth of her bench record; other details of her background were not verified and are not stated here.
George E. Fufidio (Democratic and Republican)
Fufidio sits as a Westchester County Court judge and holds a designation as an Acting Supreme Court Justice, meaning the court system has already assigned him to hear Supreme Court-level cases. He was elected to the County Court in 2015 and has roughly a decade of County Court service. He is the only candidate in this race who holds both the Democratic and the Republican nomination, reflecting cross-party agreement on his candidacy.
Alden H. Wolfe (Democratic and Conservative)
Wolfe serves as the Majority Leader of the Rockland County Legislature, representing District 6. He is also an attorney in private practice in New City, with documented work in estate planning, probate and estate administration, elder law, disability and guardianship law, business law and real estate. He has not served as a judge. His record is that of a county legislator and a practicing attorney.
Richard S. Fava Pastilha (Republican and Conservative)
Pastilha has maintained a legal practice in Westchester County for 30 years, per his campaign site. He is not a sitting judge. He is the only one of the five candidates who had an active campaign website as of mid-September 2026, making him the only one who has published a public case for his candidacy in a format voters can easily find and read.
John Ciampoli (Republican)
Ciampoli is an attorney of counsel to Messina Perillo and Hill. He is a longtime Republican election-law practitioner; the New York Law Journal identified him as the GOP elections attorney then representing the state party in election litigation when he ran for a 9th District seat in 2022. He previously served as Nassau County Attorney until County Executive Edward Mangano removed him in November 2013. He is based in Nassau County, which is on Long Island and outside the five counties of the 9th Judicial District. He carries the Republican line only.
What a Voter Can Actually Weigh
Judicial candidates in New York are ethically barred from pledging positions on issues that may come before them. A candidate who announced in advance how they would rule on any class of case would be crossing a line that exists for a reason: judges decide cases on the facts and the law, not on prior commitments to outcomes. Voters looking for ideological signals from these five candidates will not find them from the candidates themselves.
The public record offers different information. It shows whether a candidate has held a judicial office, for how long, and at what court level. For sitting judges, it may include documented rulings that reveal something about how a judge handles contested situations. For lawyers without judicial experience, it shows what areas of law they know, what public offices they have held, and whether their professional history reflects any documented controversies.
Working through those measures: this ballot includes one sitting Supreme Court justice with a documented bench record; one sitting county judge already handling Supreme Court-level cases; one county legislative leader and estate-law attorney with no bench experience; one 30-year Westchester practitioner with no bench experience; and one election-law specialist who lives outside the district and holds a single party line.
How a voter weighs judicial experience versus practice background, or local ties versus cross-party support, is a judgment no outside source can or should make for them.
Voter Information
Election Day: Tuesday, November 3, 2026. Polls open at 6 AM and close at 9 PM.
Early voting: Saturday, October 24 through Sunday, November 1, 2026. Dutchess County voters may use any early voting site in the county.
Registration: The deadline is Saturday, October 24, 2026. October 24 is also Golden Day, the one day on which a new voter can register and vote at the same time. After October 24, registration for this election is closed.
Ballot instruction: Vote for up to three. You may choose one, two or three; you are not required to choose three.
The full Dutchess County voting guide, including early voting site locations and hours, is available at Voting in Dutchess County: the October 24 deadline and everything after.
Sources: Dutchess County Board of Elections Candidate Notice; highlandscurrent.org (October 16, 2026); moderncourts.org; nycourts.gov; theballotbrief.com; theyonkersledger.com; blog.simplejustice.us (June 1, 2016); law.com/newyorklawjournal; New York State Board of Elections v. Lopez Torres, 552 U.S. 196 (2008).
