PHOTO | TROY HULL

The proposed congressional maps crafted by North Carolina lawmakers would split urban Mecklenburg County into three separate districts.

Alma Adams is accustomed to having her congressional district redrawn.

The 12th district Adams represents includes nearly all of Mecklenburg County, but under a Republican-approved map, towns north of Charlotte and southwest Charlotte would be part of the new 14th district dominated by Cleveland County, the home county of N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore, who is rumored to be interested in running for Congress. The changes are part of a GOP drive that voter access groups and civil rights activists are already challenging in court as partisan gerrymanders intended to weaken urban areas that tend to vote Democratic.

“The maps sow confusion by needlessly changing the numbers of our congressional districts,” Adams, who has represented Charlotte since 2014, said in a statement. “They split communities of interest by placing each Triad city – Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and High Point – in its own district, cracking the political power of those communities. They put north Mecklenburg and Steele Creek voters in a new Cleveland County-centric district to advance the political career of one of the politicians who drew the maps, evidence that challenges the claims of Republican leaders who said they drew this map without partisan or racial considerations. I’ve experienced the redistricting process three times since taking office in 2014, so I know a gerrymander when I see it.”

Redistricting is a once-a-decade exercise of drawing lines for congressional, legislative and municipal representation. In North Carolina, the party in control of the General Assembly – in this case, the GOP – is responsible for creating the lines. Democrats, on the other hand, contend the Republican remap gives their party an unfair advantage in a state when votes are split nearly evenly between the parties.

Under the congressional map approved by lawmakers Thursday, the GOP would likely win at least 10 of 14 districts. The proposed legislative maps for the state House’s 120 seats include 56 Republican districts, leaving the GOP four seats shy of a majority. Forty districts favor Democrats, and 24 seats are considered competitive with the parties’ registered voters within 10 percentage points of each other.

“Well before map drawing began this year, we called on the state legislature to implement a fair, transparent and inclusive redistricting process that would put people above politics,” said Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause NC. “We asked for a clear timeline for the process, more public hearings and better public accessibility for the map drawing sessions. Sadly, our requests were generally ignored, and legislative leaders have failed the people of North Carolina. Lawmakers chose to engage in a needlessly chaotic process without allowing meaningful public input and without complying with crucial legal requirements to protect voting rights.”

Gerrymandering is defined as the political manipulation of voting maps to get desired outcomes that advantage one party. In an August poll conducted by YouGov, 9 of 10 North Carolinians oppose gerrymandering, including 89% of respondents who voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020.

North Carolina’s recent history is full of bruising court battles over redistricting. The most recent struck down legislative and congressional maps drawn in 2010 by Republicans, which a state judge ruled diminished the political strength of Black voters with “surgical precision.”

The new maps, according to Duke University public policy professor Asher Hildebrand, aren’t much of an improvement.

“They're not better and in some respects worse. But there are really two questions here,” Hildebrand told reporters Wednesday. “The first is a question about the redistricting process. And the second is a question about the outcome. You've heard a lot over the last few weeks about some of the procedural changes that Republican leaders adopted this time around. And in particular, their decision not to use partisan or racial data in the drawing of the maps. And their decision to draw the maps in public view in the committee hearing room. And those certainly represent improvements over the process Republicans used a decade ago and the process used by Democrats before that, though in other respects, the process has left more to be desired.”

In a filing to the Wake County Superior Court, voters asked a judge to strike down the congressional map as a partisan gerrymander.  The filing seeks to supplement the complaint in Harper v. Lewis, which in 2019 resulted in an injunction against the district map the court found would cause “the people of our State [to] lose the opportunity to participate in congressional elections conducted freely and honestly to ascertain, fairly and truthfully, the will of the people.”

Several congressional maps proposed by Republican lawmakers cut the state’s most urban counties – Mecklenburg, Wake, and Guilford – into three or more districts. Critics say the maps are racial gerrymanders because they pack Black voters into Democratic districts, but Republicans contend the new districts were built without consulting data on race or party affiliation.

“The very criteria adopted by the legislature to create voting maps was severely flawed,” Phillips said. “Against pleas from redistricting experts, committee leaders refused to follow the law, which requires determining levels of racially polarized voting before drawing districts. The decision by committee leaders to cynically reject that legal requirement could unconstitutionally deprive Black voters of a voice in choosing their representatives for years to come.”

To Adams, there is only one way to bring any semblance of electoral equity.

“Even if it imperils my seat, we can’t allow General Assembly Republicans to subvert our democracy,” she said. “These maps must be taken to court, and they must be overturned.”

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