The News & Observer: Wake County N.C. Districts Struck Down But Too Late
RALEIGH – The districts for four N.C. House seats in Wake County will have to be redrawn again before the 2020 elections, a court ordered Friday morning in yet another loss in a gerrymandering case for the state legislators who drew the districts.
The legislature has until July 2019 to redraw the districts, the panel of three judges ordered, four days before all members of the General Assembly stand for re-election.
That means the new lines will be ready for the 2020 primaries and general election.
This case is a ripple effect, seven years later, of the 2011 redistricting led by Republican lawmakers in the N.C. General Assembly. After the 2010 census, they redrew the lines for both the state legislature and North Carolina’s U.S. congressional seats. All of those 2011 maps have since been found unconstitutional, and replacement plans like the one in question now have also been found unconstitutional.
In this case, the legislature was ordered to redraw districts for the North Carolina House of Representatives after a court found they had unconstitutionally been drawn to pack large numbers of black voters into a small number of districts, in order to diminish black voters’ political power.
Watch Video: https://www.thestate.com/news/politics-government/article205348159.html
The NAACP, League of Women Voters, A. Philip Randolph Institute, Democracy North Carolina and several voters filed a lawsuit in Wake County Superior Court on Feb. 21, 2018, challenging election lines for four state House districts — 36, 37, 40 and 41 — as violations of the state Constitution. N&O file photo
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