CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Another lawsuit is challenging North Carolina’s new district maps for both Congress and the state Legislature, alleging both racial and partisan gerrymandering.
Numerous outside analyses of the new maps have found that if Republicans and Democrats split the statewide vote roughly 50-50, Republicans would likely win 10 of the state’s 14 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives due to the way the district lines are drawn.
A GOP candidate could also flip an an 11th seat that’s considered highly competitive and could go either way. That seat, represented by Democratic Rep. G.K. Butterfield, used to be one of two majority-minority districts in North Carolina but lawmakers redrew it to be majority-white.
Republicans would also be nearly guaranteed a majority in the state Legislature in future elections under the new maps, The News & Observer has reported, due to the number of safe seats that lawmakers drew for themselves.
The lawsuit claims that even if Democratic candidates were to win the statewide vote by a significant margin, it still wouldn’t be enough to take control of the Legislature.
“Indeed, it would likely take a statewide win by at least seven points for the minority party to have a chance to elect a majority of the seats in any of those chambers — something that never happens in a state as 50-50 as North Carolina,” a press release announcing the lawsuit said.
Filed Monday in Wake County Superior Court, the lawsuit differs in several ways from another gerrymandering lawsuit filed earlier this month, which challenges only the congressional maps and only on the basis of partisan gerrymandering. That previous one makes many of the same arguments and involves many of the same lawyers as a successful 2019 gerrymandering lawsuit that forced the lines to be redrawn before the 2020 elections.
This new challenge is broader, making claims of both partisan and racial gerrymandering and seeking to overturn all of the new maps. The North Carolina League of Conservation Voters is behind the lawsuit, claiming that Republicans have unlawfully entrenched themselves in power and are using that power to fight environmental causes.
The lawsuit also proposes a new set of maps that the plaintiffs say would not only be more fair than the state’s official maps, but also score higher on several criteria the legislature came up with to guide this year’s process.
They said they drew them using computer algorithms designed to come up with the most equitable solution, rather than one intended to help a specific political party.
“This suit is about harnessing the power of mathematics and computer science to identify and remedy the severe constitutional flaws in the redistricting maps recently enacted by the North Carolina General Assembly,” the lawsuit says.
If they win, the challengers say the Legislature should be forced to redraw new, fairer maps — and that if they don’t, then a court should replace the current maps with the ones the challengers drew.
One of the plaintiffs is former Durham lawmaker Mickey Michaux Jr., a leader in the civil rights movement who became one of North Carolina’s first Black state lawmakers since Reconstruction when he was elected in the 1970s. He mostly retired from politics in 2018. Several other plaintiffs include North Carolina voters who are also professional mathematicians and helped come up with the new computer-drawn maps they’re proposing.
They say their maps would not guarantee either Democrats or Republicans a majority in an evenly split election, but rather seek the goal of “competitive elections in which the majority would be up for grabs in any given election.”
Their congressional map could range from 8-6 in favor of Republicans to 8-6 in favor of Democrats, the lawsuit says, and in the state Legislature the majority could swing either way, by a difference of a few seats in either the state House or Senate. Republicans would have a slight edge for the Legislature, but not the substantial advantage the GOP-drawn maps create.
The challengers say their maps also do a better job at protecting the rights of Black voters. Republican leaders have said this year that they don’t have reason to believe there is any racially polarized voting in North Carolina, and therefore they saw no reason to intentionally create majority-minority districts as has been required in the past.
The lawsuit disagrees, saying North Carolina has a long history of disenfranchising Black voters because they tend to oppose the favored candidates of white voters, and that majority-minority districts are necessary to help Black communities be represented in politics.
“Black citizens’ ability to attain anything approaching fair representation in the General Assembly and in North Carolina’s congressional delegation thus hinges on fair districting — that is, districting that respects the politically cohesive, geographically distinct black communities that exist today in many parts of North Carolina,” the lawsuit says.
Republican lawmakers have consistently said they did not use either racial or partisan data in drawing the maps, and have defended the process as being open and transparent. GOP leaders held multiple public hearings both before and after the initial drafts of the maps were finished, and also livestreamed the map-making process online.
“I hope that you will all acknowledge the truly historic nature of the process we have seen this time around,” Republican state Rep. Destin Hall, a top redistricting official, told Democrats before a vote on the maps. “The unprecedented transparency and the unprecedented decision to not use political data in drawing these maps.”
Typically in the past, lawmakers of both parties have instead drawn the maps behind closed doors — often using political consultants to guide their decisions. Democratic leaders have said they suspect Republicans secretly had outside help again this year, The News & Observer reported, but a top GOP redistricting official denied that.
“I have hired no outside consultants for the drawing of these maps,” Republican state Sen. Ralph Hise said.
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