The North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP and Common Cause hope to challenge the state’s new congressional map as part of their existing federal redistricting lawsuit, according to a court filing Monday afternoon.
A three-judge federal panel conducted a six-day trial this summer combining two lawsuits that challenged North Carolina congressional and legislative maps used in last year’s elections. The panel has not issued a decision in that case.
One set of plaintiffs, working with Democratic operative Marc Elias’ law firm in a case titled Williams v. Blackwell, already has filed a request to file a supplemental complaint targeting the congressional map the Republican-led General Assembly approved last week.
That map tied to Senate Bill 249 redrew two eastern congressional districts. Both districts are designed to elect Republicans, giving the GOP an 11-3 majority in the state’s US House delegation. That would mean a net gain of one seat for Republicans.
Now the second set of plaintiffs, in NAACP v. Berger, “intend to file in short order a Motion for Leave to Supplement their First Amended Complaint, appending a proposed Supplemental Complaint setting forth allegations related to the enactment of S.B. 249 and challenging the mid-decade redrawing, and configuration of, Congressional Districts 1 and 3,” according to their latest court filing.
“As will be set forth in the proposed Supplemental Complaint, the changes in S.B. 249 has caused a significant drop in the Black Voting Age Population of Congressional District 1,” the NAACP plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote. “As a consequence, and as demonstrated by past electoral data, it is unlikely that Black voters will overcome the extreme white bloc voting in this area to successfully elect a candidate of their choice under this new, even more dilutive configuration.”
“Since the enactment of S.B. 249 has only furthered and, indeed, worsened the same alleged vote dilution and harm caused by the 2023 Congressional Plan as identified in the First Amended Complaint, the case is not moot,” the court filing continued.
The Williams plaintiffs filed a separate brief Monday also arguing that the case is not moot.
Republican legislative leaders are defending challenged congressional and legislative maps in court. They agreed in a brief Monday that most of the case “remains live and ripe for adjudication.” GOP lawmakers argue that the original lawsuits’ challenge to Congressional District 1 is now moot.
But legislative leaders issued no objection to plaintiffs challenging the new District 1 in a supplemental complaint.
The Williams plaintiffs filed a 47-page document last week explaining their objections to the new congressional map.
“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.”
The Williams plaintiffs seek to have the court throw out the new congressional plan. They seek a court order “facilitating the adoption of a lawful congressional plan.”
The court filing arrived a day after the three judges overseeing the two redistricting lawsuits asked parties in the cases for information about the impact of the new congressional map.
US Appeals Court Judge Allison Jones Rushing and US District Judges Richard Myers and Thomas Schroeder conducted a six-day trial covering both cases this summer. Republican presidents appointed all three judges.
Judges allowed the targeted maps to be used during the 2024 election. If plaintiffs are successful, the Republican-led General Assembly could be forced to redraw election district lines for 2026.
Plaintiffs led by the state NAACP and Common Cause challenged maps lawmakers drew in 2023 for state House and Senate elections, along with the 14-district congressional map. The Williams case focused only on the congressional election map.
The map “eliminates two Black opportunity districts by cracking and packing Black voters in the Piedmont Triad and in Mecklenburg County,” according to the Williams plaintiffs’ trial brief. Plaintiffs label the lawmakers’ actions “intentionally discriminatory under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA).”
“Williams Plaintiffs will show that race was a motivating factor in creating the 2023 Congressional Plan (‘2023 Plan’) and in the decisions to move Black voters into and out of former Congressional Districts 6, 12, and 14, which dilutes their voting power and cannot be explained by purely partisan goals,” according to the brief.
Republican state legislative leaders defended the maps in a separate brief.
“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.”
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