A panel of three federal judges will consider whether the election districts North Carolina Republicans approved for congressional and legislative seats diminish Black voting power in violation of the Constitution and federal law.
Black and Latino voters, the state NAACP, and Common Cause are suing over districts drawn in 2023 and used in last year’s elections.
Two separate lawsuits filed in December 2023 – the first over congressional districts and the second over congressional and legislative districts – were consolidated for the trial that begins Monday in Winston-Salem.
The focus is on six of 14 congressional districts, nine of 120 state House districts, and five of 50 state Senate districts.
The lawsuit contends Republicans “drew minority voters into and out of districts based on their race” to decrease minority voting power and increase Republican power.
During the 2023 redistricting debates in the legislature, Republicans said repeatedly that they did not use racial data in creating the districts. The Senate redistricting criteria allowed partisan advantage to be considered.
In court filings, lawyers for Republican legislators suggested that the lawsuits dress partisan gerrymandering claims “in racial garb.”
The state Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court have ruled that they do not have a role in judging partisan gerrymandering. That leaves racial gerrymandering as a key reason North Carolina election district maps can be challenged.
The trial will produce no evidence of racial motive, the Republicans’ lawyers wrote.
“Legislative denials of racial motive may be discredited only based on compelling, contrary evidence. None is available.”
The shape of congressional and legislative districts helps determine which party holds power in Raleigh and in Washington.
Using a congressional district map drawn by a special master for the 2022 elections, Democrats won seven of the state’s 14 congressional seats and Republicans won seven.
Republican legislators were able to redraw the map for last year’s elections. The 2024 districts produced a North Carolina congressional delegation of 10 Republicans and four Democrats.
“Redistricting is about power. Who gets it. Who keeps it, and who ultimately gets left out,” Da’Quan Love, executive director of the state NAACP, told reporters Thursday.
“Too often, Black communities in our state are carved up, silenced, and sidelined by maps drawn not to represent us, but to restrict us,” he said. “When politicians use gerrymandering to divide our neighborhoods and weaken our votes, they’re not just manipulating the process, they are rigging the outcomes.”
The lawsuit challenges Congressional District 1 in the northeast, Congressional District 5, which is mostly in the northwest, District 6 and District 10 in the Piedmont, and Districts 12 and 14 in Mecklenburg and counties to the west.
In the Piedmont, Republican legislators sliced heavily Democratic Guilford County into pieces and divided them among majority-Republican districts. No Democrat, including Democratic incumbent, chose to run in the new Republican District 6.
The Senate districts challenged are in Mecklenburg County and in the Eastern and northeastern parts of the state.
Two of the districts are the subject of a separate lawsuit where voters contend that counties that make up part of the Black Belt in eastern North Carolina were divided to dilute Black voting power.
Senate district 8, which was redrawn to add majority Black neighborhoods in Wilmington to a predominately Republican district, is also part of the suit.
House districts challenged include those in the eastern and northeastern parts of the state, Forsyth, Wake, Vance, and Granville.
The hoped-for outcome is for the court to require the legislature to redraw the maps, said Hilary Harris Klein, a lawyer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, told reporters this week. The SCSJ is representing the state NAACP, Common Cause, and individual voters.
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