The three-judge panel overseeing two federal redistricting lawsuits in North Carolina will allow plaintiffs in both cases to challenge the state’s new congressional map. The judges want to see a schedule by Monday afternoon for resolving the legal dispute.
US Appeals Court Judge Alison Jones Rushing and District Judges Richard Myers and Thomas Schroeder issued an order Thursday permitting supplemental complaints challenging the new congressional map.
It shifts boundary lines of Congressional Districts 1 and 3. The Republican-led General Assembly justified the change as a way to pick up an additional GOP seat in the US House of Representatives. Critics say the new map violates constitutional restrictions against racial gerrymandering.
Rushing, Myers, and Schroeder held a six-day trial this summer on challenges to the congressional map used in 2024 elections, along with state House and Senate election maps. The judges have not issued a decision in the case.
“The court … concludes that for reasons of judicial efficiency, to avoid needless delay and repetition of evidence, and to preserve the extensive trial record in this case, Plaintiffs’ motions for leave to supplement their complaints should be granted,” according to the court order.
“In order to permit the court to rule as expeditiously as possible, the parties shall meet and confer and propose an abbreviated schedule for the prompt resolution of the claims in the supplemental complaints,” the order continued.
The parties will submit by 5 p.m. Monday a “proposed schedule for the court’s consideration that contemplates all deadlines necessary through trial.” If they disagree on a timeline, they will spell out their respective positions.
“In so doing, they should be guided by the court’s intention to resolve all claims as expeditiously as possible,” the judges wrote.
State lawmakers approved the new map as part of Senate Bill 249. They redrew two congressional districts in eastern North Carolina. Both districts are now designed to elect Republicans, giving the GOP a likely 11-3 majority in the state’s US House delegation. That would mean a net gain of one seat for Republicans.
Plaintiffs in the case NAACP v. Berger outlined their concerns about the new map in a proposed supplemental complaint.
“In October of 2025, with breathtaking speed and disregard for tradition, public participation, and accountability, the North Carolina General Assembly took the unprecedented step of gratuitously redistricting two of its own hand-crafted U.S. Congressional districts,” the complaint argued. “This rash action imposes the fifth new Congressional map in six years on North Carolinians. The 2025 redistricting was not prompted by the release of a decennial Census, a court order, a preference to replace a court-drawn map, or any other legitimate state interest or independent intervening cause. Rather, this extraordinary action was entirely discretionary and undertaken with precision to target Black voters in North Carolina’s Northeastern Black Belt region who, at overwhelming rates in 2024, joined together to vote against the preferred candidates and policies of those leading the General Assembly.”
Plaintiffs in the second case, titled Williams v. Hall or Williams v. Blackwell, raised similar objections. These plaintiffs are working with Democratic operative Marc Elias’ law firm.
“Over the course of just over 48 hours, the North Carolina General Assembly enacted the state’s fifth congressional plan in four years — an unnecessary, mid-decade redistricting that targets a historic Black opportunity district that has elected a Black representative to Congress for more than 30 years,” the proposed supplemental complaint argued.
“North Carolina gained a congressional district after the 2020 Census, almost entirely due to an increase in the state’s minority population,” the complaint continued. “But the General Assembly has gone to great lengths to ensure that the increase in minority population does not translate into any increase in minority electoral opportunity. In a series of successive redistricting maps, the General Assembly has systemically rolled back minority voting strength across the state.”
Republican state legislative leaders defended the 2023 maps in a brief filed earlier this year.
“Plaintiffs’ principal remaining theory is that, after persuading both the United States and North Carolina Supreme Courts that its political redistricting choices should not be subject to judicial review, the General Assembly took no advantage of its successes and configured the 2023 senate and congressional plans based not on politics, but on race,” lawmakers’ lawyers wrote. “This argument is implausible.”
Lawmakers referenced the US Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in the North Carolina case Rucho v. Common Cause. The high court decided in Rucho that it would no longer consider partisan gerrymandering complaints.
“The Supreme Court warned that, after Rucho, plaintiffs will attempt to ‘repackage a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim by exploiting the tight link between race and political preference’ and thereby ‘sidestep [the] holding in Rucho that partisan-gerrymandering claims are not justiciable,’” legislative lawyers wrote. “To prevent this, the Court held that racial-intent claims will typically require direct evidence of racial motive and that claims based on circumstantial evidence cannot succeed unless the challenger is able ‘to disentangle race from politics.’”
“Here, Plaintiffs will neither present direct evidence of racial motive nor prove that race, rather than politics, explains the district lines,” lawmakers’ lawyers argued. “That should be no surprise. The General Assembly ‘made the laudable effort to disregard race altogether in the redistricting process.’ Plaintiffs cannot prove a motive that did not exist.”
The panel “can do much of its work by asking a simple question: Is it more likely that the General Assembly chose to use racial data after finally persuading courts of its right to use political data or, instead, that the Plaintiffs are trying to sidestep Rucho and Harper by dressing partisan-gerrymandering claims in racial garb? The answer to that question is clear.”
Harper v. Hall was the 2023 NC Supreme Court decision that ended partisan gerrymandering claims in North Carolina’s state courts.
The State Board of Elections is taking no position on the merits of the plaintiffs’ arguments. The board filed a brief in the case to remind federal judges about North Carolina’s upcoming election calendar.
Candidate filing for statewide primary elections begins Dec. 1 and lasts through Dec. 19. Absentee ballots are scheduled for distribution on Jan. 13, 2026, ahead of the March 3, 2026, primary.
“If changes to the current district maps are made as a result of this litigation, the impact on the elections calendar will depend on the scope and timing of such an order,” the elections board’s lawyers wrote. “To accommodate changes to the current maps without delaying any administrative dates or deadlines for ballot preparation and distribution for the March 2026 primary, the State Board would need to receive the new map by December 1, 2025, which is approximately six weeks (38-42 days) before absentee voting is set to begin for the March 2026 primary.”
An April 8 court order granted requests from Republican legislative leaders to have portions of the two lawsuits dismissed.
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