Battleground shifts in gerrymandering fight

North Carolina groups turning to state court

RALEIGH, N.C. — Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled federal courts aren’t the place to settle partisan gerrymandering disputes, opponents of North Carolina’s district maps are putting their hopes in state courts.

An election reform group, the state Democratic Party and voters will go to court in two weeks to try to persuade state judges that Republican-drawn General Assembly districts discriminate against Democrats based on their political beliefs and voting history.

What’s different in this case is that the plaintiffs — some of whom sued in federal court over the state’s congressional map, which ended with Thursday’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision against them — argue the House and Senate boundaries violate the state constitution, not the U.S. Constitution.

“We are confident that justice will prevail in the North Carolina courts,” said Bob Phillips with the North Carolina office of Common Cause, a plaintiff in both cases. “And we will continue to work with state lawmakers to reform our broken redistricting system that has left far too many without a voice in Raleigh.”

The pending case, filed in Wake County court, marks at least the eighth lawsuit challenging North Carolina maps on the basis of racial and partisan bias since the current round of redistricting began in 2011. The lawsuits resulted in redrawing congressional lines in 2016 and legislative districts in 2017.

The state Supreme Court, which would hear an appeal of the trial court’s decision, has six registered Democrats and one Republican.

“My guess is that the North Carolina court — given its composition — will think differently than the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Guy-Uriel Charles, a Duke University redistricting expert and co-director of the Duke Law Center on Law, Race and Politics.