NC congressional districts are racially gerrymandered, new lawsuit claims
North Carolina's congressional districts were redrawn this year to intentionally discriminate against minority voters, a new federal lawsuit claims.
The lawsuit, filed Monday — the same day as candidate filing for the 2024 elections opened — seeks to stop the new Republican-backed voting lines from being used. Unless blocked in court, the new maps will be used in every election from next year through 2030.
North Carolina gained influence in Congress with an extra seat after the 2020 Census, due largely to a booming non-white population. The lawsuit says Republican lawmakers should've recognized that fact when drawing the new maps, but instead drew maps that will harm minority voters and give white conservatives a disproportionate amount of political power.
"Instead of granting minority voters the benefit of the state’s increased representation, the General Assembly majority capitalized on that gain to increase their own power and decrease minority voting power," says the lawsuit, which was filed in the Middle District of North Carolina by veteran Democratic attorney Marc Elias's firm on behalf of a group of Black and Hispanic voters.
The plaintiffs are specifically challenging four individual districts as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders: District 1 in northeastern North Carolina, District 6 stretching from parts of Greensboro to the Charlotte suburbs, District 12 in Charlotte and District 14 stretching from the Charlotte suburbs to Morganton. If they succeed in getting those districts ruled unconstitutional, it could require the legislature to redraw many if not all of the other congressional districts, too, to address the underlying problems.
The lawsuit named as defendants Republicans who lead the chambers of the state General Assembly. The party that controls the legislature is in charge of drawing the maps. The lawsuit also named state elections officials.
A spokesperson for state Senate leader Phil Berger declined to comment, as did a spokesperson for the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore said he was confident the maps would stand up to judicial scrutiny. "It has taken Democratic activists over a month after these maps were approved by the General Assembly to concoct these baseless allegations," Moore said. "This is a desperate attempt to throw chaos into North Carolina’s elections, on the first day of candidate filing no less.”
Moore is planning to run for Congress in 2024; the lawsuit names the district he's seeking as one of the four districts that are unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered.
The current 14th District is confined almost entirely to Mecklenburg County, stretching from Charlotte into the suburbs of Matthews of Gastonia. It's a safe Democratic seat held by Rep. Jeff Jackson, D-Charlotte. The new map redraws the 14th District to be a solidly Republican seat, losing most of its Mecklenburg County portion and stretching west into Morganton and Forest City. Jackson has said he will run for attorney general instead in 2024 rather than seek reelection to Congress.
In addition to redrawing the congressional districts, Republican state legislators also redrew their own districts in October, and were hit with similar accusations of slanting the lines for unfair political benefit.
They've similarly defended those maps. But already there's one lawsuit against the state Senate lines, claiming racial gerrymandering. And more legal challenges may still be on the way. Last week GOP lawmakers won an early court decision in the lawsuit against the state Senate maps, when a federal judge declined to immediately stop them from being used in 2024.
A possible 11-3 split
North Carolina has a long history of gerrymandering, for both racial and political intent, and under legislative control of Democrats and — in all the lawsuits since 2011 — Republicans. Several of the main national Supreme Court cases on gerrymandering have been from North Carolina, dating back to the 1980s.
Initial analyses of the new district lines have shown that Republicans are likely to win at least 10 of North Carolina's 14 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, even if most voters around the state vote for Democrats to represent them, based on past election data. One of the seats is expected to be competitive, meaning future elections would likely lead to either a 10-4 or 11-3 split in favor of Republicans.
Democrats say a 10-4 or 11-3 split would be unfair, due to North Carolina's status as an evenly split swing state where Republican Donald Trump won in both 2016 and 2020, but each time with less than 50% of the vote. Republicans counter that Democrats are too clustered in major cities, leading to districts that favor conservative voters who tend to be more spread out across the state.
The districts used in the 2022 elections are currently represented by an even split of seven Republicans and seven Democrats. They were drawn under court order by a team of experts after the original maps, which GOP lawmakers drew after the 2020 Census, were struck down as unconstitutionally gerrymandered.
The new map accomplishes its more lopsided pro-Republican split by packing massive numbers of Democrats into just three districts — one in Charlotte and two in the Triangle — while also splitting up other smaller metro areas around Greensboro and Fayetteville into multiple districts, to combine pieces of those cities with far-flung rural areas, creating Republican-leaning districts.
State GOP leaders have defended their actions in drawing the maps as perfectly within their authority under the North Carolina Constitution, which gives the state legislature near-unlimited power over redistricting. But the federal lawsuit claims the maps violate part of the U.S. Constitution, specifically around ensuring equal protection.
"The 2023 Congressional Plan continues North Carolina’s long tradition of enacting redistricting plans that pack and crack minority voters into gerrymandered districts designed to minimize their voting strength," the lawsuit says.
