Trial next week targets NC election maps

North Carolina’s congressional and legislative election maps head to trial next week before a three-judge federal court panel. The NAACP, Common Cause, and individual voters challenge the maps as violating the US Constitution’s ban on racial gerrymandering.

The trial is scheduled to start Monday morning in Winston-Salem.

US Appeals Court Judge Allison Jones Rushing and US District Judges Richard Myers and Thomas Schroeder are overseeing the trial in two consolidated cases. All three judges were appointed by Republican presidents.

Judges allowed the targeted maps to be used during the 2024 election. If plaintiffs are successful, the Republican-led General Assembly could be forced to redraw election district lines for 2026.  

In one case, plaintiffs led by the NAACP and Common Cause challenged maps lawmakers drew in 2023 for state House and Senate elections, along with the 14-district congressional map.

Plaintiffs argue that legislators “Unlawfully diluted the power of Black voters on account of race in North Carolina’s historic Black Belt Senate Districts (SDs) 1 and 2 in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” according to a trial brief filed in May.

The NAACP suit alleges that lawmakers “unlawfully racially gerrymandered SD8, … in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment” and “Intentionally diluted Black voting power in violation of VRA Section 2 … and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments … in challenged Senate Districts.”

Critics also argue that lawmakers “Intentionally diluted Black voting power in violation of VRA Section 2 in specific Congressional Districts (CDs), including CD1, … and Triad-based CD5, CD6, and CD10, … and that these intentional acts also constitute intentional discrimination in violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.”

An April court order threw out additional claims that state Senate districts in Mecklenburg and New Hanover Counties and state House districts in Wake and Forsyth counties violated the constitutional “guarantee of one-person, one-vote.” That same order allowed the remaining claims to head to trial.

“Plaintiffs may prove these claims with a preponderance of the evidence by showing it is ‘more probable than not’ Defendants have committed the above violations,” according to the trial brief.

The second case, Williams v. Hall, focuses specifically on the congressional election map. Plaintiffs in that case are working with Democratic operative Marc Elias’ law firm.

The map “eliminates two Black opportunity districts by cracking and packing Black voters in the Piedmont Triad and in Mecklenburg County,” according to the Williams plaintiffs’ trial brief. Plaintiffs label the lawmakers’ actions “intentionally discriminatory under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA).”

“Williams Plaintiffs will show that race was a motivating factor in creating the 2023 Congressional Plan (‘2023 Plan’) and in the decisions to move Black voters into and out of former Congressional Districts 6, 12, and 14, which dilutes their voting power and cannot be explained by purely partisan goals,” according to the brief.

Republican state legislative leaders defended the maps in a separate brief.

“Plaintiffs’ principal remaining theory is that, after persuading both the United States and North Carolina Supreme Courts that its political redistricting choices should not be subject to judicial review, the General Assembly took no advantage of its successes and configured the 2023 senate and congressional plans based not on politics, but on race,” lawmakers’ lawyers wrote. “This argument is implausible.”

Lawmakers referenced the US Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in the North Carolina case Rucho v. Common Cause. The high court decided in Rucho that it would no longer consider partisan gerrymandering complaints.

 “The Supreme Court warned that, after Rucho, plaintiffs will attempt to ‘repackage a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim by exploiting the tight link between race and political preference’ and thereby ‘sidestep [the] holding in Rucho that partisan-gerrymandering claims are not justiciable,’” legislative lawyers wrote. “To prevent this, the Court held that racial-intent claims will typically require direct evidence of racial motive and that claims based on circumstantial evidence cannot succeed unless the challenger is able ‘to disentangle race from politics.’”

“Here, Plaintiffs will neither present direct evidence of racial motive nor prove that race, rather than politics, explains the district lines,” lawmakers’ lawyers argued. “That should be no surprise. The General Assembly ‘made the laudable effort to disregard race altogether in the redistricting process.’ Plaintiffs cannot prove a motive that did not exist.”

The panel “can do much of its work by asking a simple question: Is it more likely that the General Assembly chose to use racial data after finally persuading courts of its right to use political data or, instead, that the Plaintiffs are trying to sidestep Rucho and Harper by dressing partisan-gerrymandering claims in racial garb? The answer to that question is clear.”

Harper v. Hall was the 2023 NC Supreme Court decision that ended partisan gerrymandering claims in North Carolina’s state courts.

The State Board of Elections is taking no position on the merits of the plaintiffs’ arguments. The board filed a brief in the case to remind federal judges about North Carolina’s upcoming election calendar.

Candidate filing for statewide primary elections begins Dec. 1 and lasts through Dec. 19. Absentee ballots are scheduled for distribution on Jan. 13, 2026, ahead of the March 3, 2026, primary.

“If changes to the current district maps are made as a result of this litigation, the impact on the elections calendar will depend on the scope and timing of such an order,” the elections board’s lawyers wrote. “To accommodate changes to the current maps without delaying any administrative dates or deadlines for ballot preparation and distribution for the March 2026 primary, the State Board would need to receive the new map by December 1, 2025, which is approximately six weeks (38-42 days) before absentee voting is set to begin for the March 2026 primary.”

An April 8 court order granted requests from Republican legislative leaders to have portions of the two lawsuits dismissed.

Lawmakers challenged the NAACP plaintiffs’ ability to challenge some districts. Legislative lawyers argued that the plaintiffs had standing to sue only if they had members living in the challenged districts.

“Consolidated Plaintiffs claim that North Carolina’s redistricting plans violate Section 2 of the [Voting Rights Act], the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment,” the three-judge panel wrote in April. “In each instance, the alleged harm to any voter arises from the boundaries and composition of the particular district in which the voter resides. The voter therefore ‘has standing to assert only that his own district has been’ gerrymandered or malapportioned, or his own vote diluted.”

“Nonetheless, Associational Plaintiffs attempt to expand their standing to sue beyond the districts where their allegedly injured members reside, based on two erroneous theories,” the panel added. “First, Associational Plaintiffs argue they need not identify a member with standing in every challenged district for their vote dilution claims under Section 2 of the VRA so long as they have identified members in other ‘challenged districts in the same area where vote dilution has occurred.’ They contend that standing is established by showing they have members who would reside in their proposed demonstrative districts if a revised map were redrawn along those lines. That does not suffice.”

The judges agreed to strike down challenges to state Senate Districts 7, 38, 39, and 42; House Districts 4, 11, 21, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 49, 66, 72, 74, 75, and 91; and Congressional District 9. “Because no allegedly injured Plaintiff or member of an Associational Plaintiff resides in those districts, Consolidated Plaintiffs lack standing as to those districts and cannot challenge them in this litigation,” the judges wrote.

The panel rejected lawmakers’ request to remove other targeted districts from the lawsuits. Plaintiffs can continue to pursue their cases against state Senate Districts 1, 2, 8, 40, and 41; House Districts 5, 7, 10, 12, 24, 25, 32, 37, and 71; and Congressional Districts 1, 5, 6, 10, 12, and 14.

Judges also threw out two counts of the NAACP suit dealing with claims of malapportionment. Plaintiffs claimed that some districts included too many or too few voters to comply with federal law. Specific targets were state Senate districts in New Hanover, Brunswick, Columbus, Mecklenburg, and Iredell counties and House districts in Wake, Forsyth, and Stokes counties.

“Plaintiffs have not met their burden on summary judgment,” the panel wrote. Critics failed to show that the redistricting plans’ “minor deviations from mathematical equality”  resulted from illegitimate reasons.

Critics did not show that the election maps created a “systematic partisan advantage,” the judges determined. “Plaintiffs thus have abandoned any effort to prove their claims by showing systematic partisanship, the one type of evidence courts have found sufficient to prove malapportionment in prior cases with only minor deviations from population equality.”

The trial is scheduled through next week. Additional trial dates are scheduled July 8-9.

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