Civil rights groups file suit over proposed NC voting maps

State lawmakers haven’t even voted on new congressional and legislative district maps yet, but they’re already being sued over them.

2021-10-29

The Southern Coalition for Social Justice filed suit Friday afternoon in Wake County Superior Court on behalf of the state NAACP, the voting-rights group Common Cause North Carolina and four individual voters.

The suit asks a judge to block the implementation of maps lawmakers will consider next week for failing to consider race, saying several of the proposed maps would have result in reduced minority representation in Congress and the state legislature.

According to SCSJ attorney Allison Riggs, North Carolina law requires districts to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act, which requires lawmakers to assess racially polarized voting in districts before they redraw them.

“They simply can’t do that without considering race,” Riggs said in a news release.

“Lawmakers’ supposed ‘race-blind’ redistricting process is rigged to reduce the strength of our votes, silence our voices and negate decades of struggle and sacrifice for fairer maps,” state NAACP President Deborah Dicks Maxwell said in the release. “You can’t represent all of North Carolina if you claim not to see us.”

“By cynically ignoring the law, legislative leaders are crafting maps that would unconstitutionally deprive Black voters of a voice in choosing their representatives,” added Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause.

The plaintiffs are also asking a judge to delay filing deadlines for 2022 elections to allow more time for public comments and for potential candidates to decide whether they want to run in the new districts.

In 2016, state lawmakers had to redraw maps and hold a second primary election because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the maps put in place by Republican lawmakers in 2011 relied so heavily on race that they constituted an illegal racial gerrymander, reducing the voting power of Black communities.

In their redraw at the time, lawmakers said they would not consider race at all, instead considering only partisanship.

Those maps passed federal judicial muster, but the North Carolina Supreme Court found they were unconstitutionally gerrymandered and required yet another redraw.

State lawmakers dismissed the lawsuit on Friday.

"This same lawsuit outfit sued us previously because we used race, and now they’re suing us because we didn’t use race," Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, who leads the Senate's redistricting efforts, said in a statement. "The only constant here is finding any excuse to sue to gain partisan advantage, no matter how contradictory, and they’re doing it before the maps have even been considered by a legislative committee."