The Supreme Court's welcome intervention in N.C. redistricting
Published April 21, 2015
by Eric Frazier, The Charlotte Observer, April 20, 2015.
The Supreme Court’s move Monday to send North Carolina’s controversial 2011 redistricting maps back for further study is not unexpected, but nonetheless welcome.
It became clear last month that the court was headed in that direction after it issued a similar edict to Alabama over its redistricting case. The court ruled 5-4 that Alabama’s political maps wrongly packed black voters into too few districts, watering down their voting clout while carving out safer districts for white Republicans.
The challenge to North Carolina’s maps is similar. Thus, it wasn’t a surprise that the justices on Monday overturned the N.C. Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the 2011 boundaries for General Assembly and congressional races. Without elaborating, the nation’s highest court told the N.C. Supreme Court to consider the Alabama ruling and take another look at North Carolina’s electoral districts.
The Republicans who drew North Carolina’s map lines have insisted that they were simply following the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by making sure there were black-majority districts. Sen. Bob Rucho of Matthews and other GOP mapmakers said Monday that they’re confident the districts can withstand a second round of scrutiny.
But, as the civil rights groups and Democrats challenging the maps correctly note, the 2011 mapmakers added minorities to districts where blacks were already wielding considerable clout and electing candidates they favored.
Common sense suggests that you aren’t protecting the overall voting clout of minorities by packing more of them into districts they already control.
It would also suggest that the more of them you pack in, the safer you are making the turf outside such districts for the party they typically oppose – i.e., the GOP.
Events on the ground here in North Carolina since 2011 haven’t done much to disprove that argument. State politics have become more partisan. Conservatives in the N.C. Senate, freed by their safe seats, have adopted hard-right political stances that leave much of the state’s evenly divided electorate scratching its collective head.
Now, thankfully, the state Supreme Court will have to take a second look at the 2011 maps. While the state court reconsiders, N.C. legislators should take this as a sign that it’s time to clean up our troubled redistricting system. It was exploited by hyper-partisan Democrats for decades, and hyper-partisan Republicans have been enjoying their long-sought turn at the wheel.
Several reform bills have been put forward in the legislature. One from Democratic Sen. Jeff Jackson of Charlotte and Republican Rep. Charles Jeter of Huntersville, calls for nonpartisan redrawing of districts starting in 2031.
Monday’s Supreme Court ruling offers new hope that we could perhaps see reform – or at least new maps – much sooner than that.
Eric Frazier
April 21, 2015 at 10:02 am
Norm Kelly says:
'our troubled redistricting system ... was exploited by hyper-partisan Democrats for decades'. So, what libs are telling us now is that what's good for the goose definitely is NOT good for the gander. Play the game by lib rules or else!
So the proposal to CHANGE the process, attempt to remove gerry from the process starting in 2031 is a good idea. It gives both parties time to play with redistricting between now & then. Hopefully this will be a period where Republicans, and true conservatives, control Raleigh. Perhaps by 2031 we can get the state back in line with where it should be, the budget can be balanced, and our economy will be booming. Cuz it's for sure when libs get the power to play with gerry, all the good stuff goes out the window again, and we'll be stuck with more socialism once again, as well as unpredictable budgets. Talk about interfering in politics across the state! Nobody butts their noses into other people's business/jurisdictions as well as lib/demon/socialists!
How will libs/blacks/media-types respond IF the state court once again rules that the current maps are acceptable. What's the deal with libs packing blacks into districts to insure they get to elect a black person, but it's possible to pack TOO MANY blacks into a district? Does this border on the insane? Of course it does, they are libs!
April 21, 2015 at 10:42 am
Richard L Bunce says:
What renders all this as so much nonsense is the "race" data being used is from the Census and "race" in the census is based on self identification per the Federal government directives on "race" and Census guidelines on "race". There are no "races" in our species. This is just social science nonsense created by social scientists as the science of genetics advanced. There is no right or wrong answer by the respondent and the answer cannot be verified or validated. Every ten years the same respondent can provide a different answer. Yet using this data the US DoJ can force States to redraw districts and the courts can try to determine the intent of the district makers in using this very flawed data. Residents can make this problem go away if everyone answers the 2020 Census "race" question as African American which would render the answers not just meaningless but irrelevant and be actually correct since our species homo sapien first appeared on the African continent several tens of thousands of years ago.
The other fix is that by 2020 the State Legislature should move to an algorithmic based redistricting process whose only inputs are number of districts, land area to be divided into districts, distribution of the population in the land area by Census tracks and perhaps County borders. No other demographic data such as age, sex, political affiliation, religion, "race"/ethnicity, etc. would be allowed. Here is one example...
http://rangevoting.org/GerryExec.html
April 22, 2015 at 4:10 pm
Lee Mortimer says:
How can anyone (let alone a Democrat) seriously propose that we should wait until 2031 to fix this insanity. If Republicans are smart, they will take this opportunity to create an interim non-partisan process to redraw the current districts, then move to make it a permanent process for post-2020 redistricting. If Democrats are smart, they will take the deal rather than go through perhaps years more litigation to get a resolution.
April 23, 2015 at 10:24 am
Richard L Bunce says:
There are no non partisan humans...
