Judges remove districts, drop other claims in NC redistricting suits

A three-judge panel has struck down challenges to more than 20 legislative and congressional districts in two consolidated federal redistricting lawsuits. The panel also rejected claims that North Carolina election maps include too many or too few voters in some challenged districts.

A court order Tuesday granted requests from Republican legislative leaders to have portions of the two lawsuits dismissed. Judges will allow election map critics to continue to pursue claims challenging other districts.

A trial in the two cases is scheduled for June in Winston-Salem.

US Appeals Court Judge Allison Jones Rushing and US District Judges Richard Myers and Thomas Schroeder are overseeing the two cases. All three judges were appointed by Republican presidents.

Eighteen voters in the Williams v. Hall case targeted four districts in the state’s 2023 congressional election map. They claim racial gerrymandering, intentional discrimination, and intentional vote dilution.

In the case North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v. Berger, the civil rights group and left-of-center activist group Common Cause led a group of plaintiffs challenging congressional districts along with multiple state House and Senate districts. The NAACP and Common Cause are considered “associational plaintiffs.”

Legislative leaders defending the state’s election maps challenged the NAACP plaintiffs’ ability to challenge some districts. Lawmakers’ lawyers argued that the plaintiffs had standing to sue only if they had members living in the challenged districts.

“Consolidated Plaintiffs claim that North Carolina’s redistricting plans violate Section 2 of the [Voting Rights Act], the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment,” the three-judge panel wrote Tuesday. “In each instance, the alleged harm to any voter arises from the boundaries and composition of the particular district in which the voter resides. The voter therefore ‘has standing to assert only that his own district has been’ gerrymandered or malapportioned, or his own vote diluted.”

“Nonetheless, Associational Plaintiffs attempt to expand their standing to sue beyond the districts where their allegedly injured members reside, based on two erroneous theories,” the panel added. “First, Associational Plaintiffs argue they need not identify a member with standing in every challenged district for their vote dilution claims under Section 2 of the VRA so long as they have identified members in other ‘challenged districts in the same area where vote dilution has occurred.’ They contend that standing is established by showing they have members who would reside in their proposed demonstrative districts if a revised map were redrawn along those lines. That does not suffice.”

The judges agreed to strike down challenges to state Senate Districts 7, 38, 39, and 42; House Districts 4, 11, 21, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 49, 66, 72, 74, 75, and 91; and Congressional District 9. “Because no allegedly injured Plaintiff or member of an Associational Plaintiff resides in those districts, Consolidated Plaintiffs lack standing as to those districts and cannot challenge them in this litigation,” the judges wrote.

The panel rejected lawmakers’ request to remove other targeted districts from the lawsuits. Plaintiffs can continue to pursue their cases against state Senate Districts 1, 2, 8, 40, and 41; House Districts 5, 7, 10, 12, 24, 25, 32, 37, and 71; and Congressional Districts 1, 5, 6, 10, 12, and 14.

Judges also threw out two counts of the NAACP suit dealing with claims of malapportionment. Plaintiffs claimed that some districts included too many or too few voters to comply with federal law. Specific targets were state Senate districts in New Hanover, Brunswick, Columbus, Mecklenburg, and Iredell counties and House districts in Wake, Forsyth, and Stokes counties.

“Plaintiffs have not met their burden on summary judgment,” the panel wrote. Critics failed to show that the redistricting plans’ “minor deviations from mathematical equality”  resulted from illegitimate reasons.

Critics did not show that the election maps created a “systematic partisan advantage,” the judges determined. “Plaintiffs thus have abandoned any effort to prove their claims by showing systematic partisanship, the one type of evidence courts have found sufficient to prove malapportionment in prior cases with only minor deviations from population equality.”

Voters used the challenged maps for the 2024 elections. If the plaintiffs successfully challenge any other portion of the legislative or congressional maps, the General Assembly would be forced to redraw maps for 2026.

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