Just a week after a federal court struck down North Carolina’s voter ID law, a good-elections group and North Carolina Democrats are suing General Assembly Republicans for another measure taken by the General Assembly to cement Republican control over North Carolina’s elections: gerrymandering.
Common Cause, the North Carolina Democratic Party, Democratic House Leader Larry Hall and several other plaintiffs filed a suit in federal court today against the state for its new Congressional districts, dreamt up in the wake of a federal ruling against the old ones.
In a one-day February special session, Rep. David Lewis, a co-chair of the Redistricting Committee, said that the only reason they were drawing ten Republican districts was because “they couldn’t make it eleven.”
“In a state in which 50 percent of the voters cast their ballots for Democratic candidates and only 30 percent of registered voters identify themselves as Republicans, the Republican-dominated legislature has enacted a plan designed to award 10 of our 13 seats in Congress to Republican candidates,” said NCDP executive director Kimberly Reynolds in a statement. “That is wrong by any measure.”
“What is at stake is whether politicians have the power to manipulate voting maps to unjustly insulate themselves from accountability, or whether voters have the fundamental right as Americans to choose their representatives in fair and open elections,” added NC Common Cause executive director Bob Phillips. “We believe this is a vital case that could strike at the very foundation of gerrymandering.”
Senator Bob Rucho, the other co-chair of that committee and a defendant in the suit, told the Charlotte Observer that the suit is another effort to “advance the Democratic partisan interest,” and that it was “another effort to steal the right to vote of North Carolinians.”
You can read the full lawsuit below.
