North Carolina Election Fight

Supreme Court Won’t Intervene in North Carolina Election Fight

By RICHARD FAUSSET

The United States Supreme Court declined late Friday to stay a lower court ruling that has forced North Carolina’s Republican-dominated legislature to redraw its congressional electoral maps on the grounds that the original maps amounted to racial gerrymandering.

As a result, the state must now follow a contingency plan, also devised by Republican lawmakers, that tries to comply with the lower court’s ruling by making significant changes to the boundaries of the some of the state’s 13 congressional districts.

The changes take effect less than one month before the originally scheduled March 15 primary, which has forced the legislature to set up a second election dedicated exclusively to the congressional primaries, which will now take place June 7.

The contingency plan was approved by the state legislature on Friday, hours before the Supreme Court announced that it had rejected North Carolina Republicans’ application for a stay. But the approval of the contingency plan came over the strenuous objection of Democrats, who claimed that the new congressional maps were hyperpartisan — giving Republicans 10 safe districts to the Democrats’ three — and still failed to protect black voters’ interests.

Such resistance was to be expected in this deeply divided swing state, where other battles over election laws can potentially affect presidential elections. Since Republicans took control of the legislature five years ago, Democrats and their allies have complained that Republicans have been illegally changing the rules of the voting game and effectively suppressing minority voting power. They have mounted numerous legal challenges, which Republicans have largely dismissed as desperate attempts by Democrats to regain their faltering political strength.

But North Carolina now faces a chaotic situation just when some voters have already begun sending in absentee ballots under the old congressional districting scheme. Under the new plan, two members of Congress, Representatives George Holding, a Republican from Raleigh, and Alma Adams, a Democrat from Greensboro, will be drawn into new districts.

Barring some other intervention by the courts, a congressional primary will take place on June 7, and the previously established March 15 primary date would still go forward for the presidential race and other contests. And more than 2,000 residents who have already turned in absentee ballots to the state board of elections will not have their votes counted in the congressional races, although they would be free to vote again in the June 7 race.

No one is quite sure where this all ends up. “If you figure this out let me know,” said Carter Wrenn, a longtime Republican operative who is serving as the campaign consultant for Mr. Holding. “Whenever you mix politicians and judges,” Mr. Wrenn added, “you get a mess.”

Like many recent election law lawsuits here, race was at the heart of the legal challenge to the 2011 congressional map that was drawn up by Republicans after the 2010 census. The plaintiffs, residents of North Carolina, brought the lawsuit in 2013, alleging that congressional Districts One and 12 had been drawn up in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. They argued that lawmakers, in creating the 2011 boundaries, used the Voting Rights Act as a pretext to pack black voters into the two districts, thus making surrounding districts safer for Republicans.

Republicans said they were making a good-faith effort to comply with the law. But in its Feb. 5 ruling, a three-judge panel of the United States District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina sided with the plaintiffs, finding “strong evidence that race was the only nonnegotiable criterion and that traditional redistricting principles were subordinated to race.”

The court ordered the legislature to redraw the maps, and this week, lawmakers set about their work in a special session. But this time, there would be a key difference: Race would not be factored into the mapmaking at all.

“Race was not considered, and is not present in these reports,” State Representative David R. Lewis, a Republican and co-chairman of the redistricting committee, told his colleagues on the House floor Friday. But Democrats argued that Republicans erred in ignoring race altogether. Representative G. K. Butterfield, an African-American, wrote to state legislative leaders, saying that the court “stated that race should not be the predominant factor in drawing the districts. However, the court did not say that race should not be a factor at all.”

Mr. Butterfield added that drawing districts that “do not protect the voting interest of African-American communities” was a violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

In an interview Friday, Mr. Butterfield said the proposed new boundaries for his district, which covers most of urban Durham County, had not changed so much that he would have to seriously alter his election strategy. Under the proposal, the district would still have a large number of African-American voters.

House Democrats on Friday also assailed Republicans for stating that the new map was drawn up to ensure that they would enjoy a partisan advantage. While Democrats also acknowledged that their party had engaged in its share of partisan gerrymandering in the many decades that it controlled the legislature, they argued that Democrats did not engage in the practice to the same degree.

State Senator Josh Stein, a Democratic candidate for attorney general, noted that North Carolina was the state that President Obama most narrowly won in 2008 and most narrowly lost in 2012. “North Carolina is a 50-50 state, and yet this map all but guarantees 10 out of our 13 congressional delegations will be Republican,” he said. “We live in North Carolina, not North Korea. The voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around.”

Some Democrats were also hoping that the three-judge panel of the lower court would now reject the altered map on the grounds that it violated the Voting Rights Act. Republican legislators had held out hope on Friday that the Supreme Court would issue a stay.

But a statement released by the justices late Friday tersely advised that the state’s application for a stay had been denied.

Richard L. Hasen, a voting-rights expert and professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, wrote on his blog Friday that it was “quite possible that there could be a Voting Rights Act violation now.”

“The problem with the last plan was that North Carolina took race too much into account. But now perhaps N.C. did not take race enough into account to assure that the districts comply with Section 2 of the Act, which requires the creation of minority opportunity districts under certain circumstances,” he wrote.

Mr. Hasen also raised the possibility that the new plan could be challenged as a “partisan gerrymander,” though he said it was unclear if the Supreme Court would be open to such an argument.

“What a mess in North Carolina,” he wrote.