National

Supreme Court defers new case from North Carolina challenging partisan election maps

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court refused again Monday to decide whether state legislatures can draw election maps for partisan gain.

The justices sent a challenge to North Carolina's 13 congressional districts -- 10 of which were drawn to favor Republicans despite relative parity statewide between the GOP and Democrats -- back to a federal district court for further review.

The action was based on procedural flaws the justices found in a similar case from Wisconsin last week. But unlike that case, challengers in North Carolina appear to meet the high court's procedural hurdles, such as having a plaintiff in every challenged district.

Allison Riggs, senior voting rights attorney for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said, "We hope to get this case back before the U.S. Supreme Court next term, in time for fair districts for 2020."

The North Carolina case, like those from Wisconsin and Maryland, offered the high court a chance to do something it has never done before: declare a blatantly partisan gerrymander unconstitutional.

Across the nation, thousands of state legislators and hundreds of members of Congress are elected in districts drawn to favor the party that controls the map-drawing process. That has largely favored Republicans during the past decade.

Faced with two opportunities this year, the justices blinked. They ruled that challengers to Wisconsin's state Assembly districts could not challenge the map on a statewide basis. And they said the challenge to Maryland's congressional districts was premature.

That leaves Pennsylvania as the only state where candidates will compete this fall in districts redrawn because of partisan overreach, thanks to a state Supreme Court ruling. Other battles being waged in federal courts, including those in Ohio and Michigan, will affect the 2020 elections at the earliest.

At stake in many states are state legislative districts as well as those for Congress. The statehouse challenges are particularly important, because the lawmakers elected in 2020 will get to draw lines for the next decade.

In North Carolina's case, the facts aren't even in dispute. State lawmakers in the relatively "purple" state, which swings between Democrats and Republicans in statewide elections, declared their intentions on camera.

"We want to make clear that to the extent we are going to use political data in drawing this map, it is to gain partisan advantage,” Rep. David Lewis after an earlier map of House districts was struck down in court because of racial discrimination.

“I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”

Challengers contend the map protected Republicans by packing Democratic voters into cities such as Charlotte and "cracking" them between separate districts in other places. North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, the nation's largest historically black college with some 10,000 students, was split down the middle between two congressional districts.

“If this case is not the limit, then there may be no limit,” said Ben Thorpe, one of the lawyers representing Common Cause.

But GOP lawmakers note the districts are more compact and contiguous than past maps drawn by Democrats.