This Tuesday, the North Carolina Superior Court issued a ruling on the state’s legislative maps for the General Assembly, throwing them out as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders. The districts were drawn in 2017, after the last maps were also ruled unconstitutional for being based on racial data.
The ruling is significant because it follows a profound defeat for voting rights advocates at the Supreme Court, which ruled that it could not identify and throw out overly-partisan maps. However, the court left the door open for state courts to decide, as North Carolina has now demonstrated.
In their opinion, the judges unanimously ordered the legislature to submit new maps by September 18th of this year, in time to be evaluated for use in the 2020 elections. This is hugely significant for the political make-up of the General Assembly, which currently consists of Republican majorities in both chambers, even though the GOP won a minority of the vote in the 2018 midterms. The judges in this case have finally restored democracy to the state legislature after nearly a decade of stark gerrymandering, and specifically restored it to college students who were discriminated against in these maps.
Controversy over the legislative maps began in 2011, when Republicans took over the state legislature, a trend mirrored across the country. In North Carolina, the governor has no ability to veto maps passed by the legislature,so the General Assembly voted in favor of highly skewed maps, which granted the GOP control of the legislature every cycle since then.
Legislators in North Carolina employed the same person, political strategist Thomas Hofeller, to draw both the 2011 and the 2017 maps. Hofeller was recently in the news because of his involvement with adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Hard drives of his discovered after his death contained information indicating that the question was to be added for the purpose of advancing Republicans’ electoral strength.
Those same hard drives also show that in drawing the North Carolina’s Congressional maps (which weren’t involved in this ruling), Hofeller compiled precise data on the race and voting patterns of students at NC A&T in order to split the campus across two reliable Republican districts, despite students’ Democratic lean. Similar data was collected for over 23 thousand students at universities across the state.
The legislature thus has a clear history of diluting students’ voting power, a history that has now been partially resolved by the courts. However, as mentioned previously, this ruling still doesn’t affect the maps used to send North Carolina’s representatives to Congress, although the same reasoning used in this case could likely apply there as well. One additional effect of this ruling, then, could be to encourage voting rights groups to challenge the congressional district maps in state court. This could lead to a delegation vastly more reflective of North Carolina’s battleground status than the current 8-3 Republican to Democrat balance.
This recent court ruling is a phenomenal example of the judiciary being used to check abuses of power by another branch of government. It allows students at NC State and other colleges to have fair representation in the General Assembly, something they’ve been denied for almost the entire decade. Students shouldn’t let this opportunity fall through their grasp.
We must use our newfound power in 2020 to elect state officials who will take action on causes important to us, like university funding, climate preparations and ensuring job opportunities and high wages for us after we graduate. If not, we could end up right back here in 2021 with a fresh set of gerrymanders and a new years-long court battle to fight for our right to an equal vote.
