A WELCOME REBUKE OF NORTH CAROLINA’S REDISTRICTING
Monday’s Supreme Court ruling against the North Carolina legislature is a welcome rebuke of legislators who redrew two congressional districts unconstitutionally by relying on improper racial considerations. The decision could affect other similar cases, many of them in the South, by targeting redistricting decisions that involved racial and partisan factors, to the advantage of the legislatures’ Republican majorities.
The justices found that in redrawing the congressional map, legislators used racial gerrymandering to pack African-American voters into the districts represented at the time by Democrats. (The map produced a snake-like district meandering from southwest Greensboro all the way to Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County.) That tactic, cited in previous Supreme Court rulings in two other Southern states, diluted blacks’ voting power and reflected legislators’ effort to diminish the number of North Carolina districts that Democrats could win.
The North Carolina ruling could make it easier to challenge future redistricting results on partisan as well as racial grounds.
The ruling’s importance, however, is not limited just to political maneuvering in the First and Twelfth congressional districts in North Carolina, my native state. It comes at a time when American democracy is under siege by the Trump administration and its congressional allies.
“Siege” is not too strong a word.
President Trump recently signed an executive order creating a commission intended to review fraudulent registration, voter fraud and vote suppression, according to a White House official. The executive order reflects Trump’s petulant and, yes, mendacious claim that besides winning the Electoral College, he would have won the popular vote but for the millions of people “who voted illegally.”
White House officials have been unable to defend the president’s baseless claims but their dismay is irrelevant.
Undeterred, Trump and like-minded allies are engaged in an effort trying to brainwash Americans into believing that our political system is tainted by fraudulent voting. The only “solution”: drastic measures to “protect” American democracy.
That would be a solution desperately in search of a problem.
As nonpartisan studies have found, there is no evidence to support claims of rampant in-person voter fraud. Although some post-election audits have noted occasional instances of voter wrongdoing, they are usually the result of flawed registration procedures or turn up in the processing of absentee ballots.
Such caveats tend to get lost in the clamor for drastic measures intended to combat alleged voter fraud. That clamor is useful because it enables “anti-voter fraud” advocates. By repeating a lie over and over, especially in political matters, the lie comes to be regarded as truth.
Authoritative voices of reason can also be obscured by the president’s braying that five to 10 million people, mostly “undocumented immigrants,” voted in last year’s election, battalions of operatives deployed to undermine American democracy. The National Association of Secretaries of State, whose members administer elections nationwide, dismissed Trump’s “beliefs,” as press secretary Sean Spicer described the president’s “evidence.”
The only evidence that matters is what will survive judicial scrutiny. That is what the Supreme Court provided in overturning the unconstitutionality of those two North Carolina districts. And an earlier ruling was even more valuable in disallowing tightened voter identification requirements and a cutback on early voting. An appellate court ruled these moves amounted to an unconstitutional effort to target African-Americans with “almost surgical precision.”
It’s dismaying to see so much Republican support for measures that target a bedrock of American democracy, given the party’s historic support of strengthening civil rights. How do party members square that with their omnipresent American flag lapel pins?
Michael Loftin is a former opinion editor of The Chattanooga Times.