Federal Courthouse in Winston-Salem, NC (Photo: Lynn Bonner/NC Newsline)
WINSTON-SALEM — The latest federal trial over claims that North Carolina’s election district plans dilute Black voting power in violation of federal law concluded Wednesday with competing expert testimony.
Lawyers for civil rights groups and voters told a panel of three judges that they’d proven their points, while a lawyer for Republican legislators argued that election lines were drawn for partisan reasons to advantage GOP candidates.
“It doesn’t make sense they would use race and invite liability when they can use partisanship,” said Katherine McKnight, the Republicans’ lawyer.
The North Carolina NAACP, Common Cause and a group of Black voters, and a separate group of Black and Latino voters sued in 2023 over redistricting plans drawn that year and used in in the 2024 elections. The two lawsuits were consolidated for the federal trial held in Winston-Salem before a three-judge panel. The claims originally included sets of state House, state Senate, and congressional districts, but claims against the state House districts were dismissed.
Black voting power diluted in multiple regions
The civil rights groups and voters contend Republican legislators drew districts that dilute the voting power of Black citizens so that they are no longer able to elect candidates of their choice. Republican legislators said they used political data, not racial data, to create the districts.
The state gained a congressional seat after the 2020 census, partly due to the increase in the Black population, said Lali Madduri, a lawyer representing Black and Latino voters. That increase has not translated into more voting power for Black residents, she said.
Black voters were able to elect candidates of their choice in 6.2 of the state’s 14 congressional districts in 2022, Madduri said, while that dropped to 3.8 districts in the 2023 plan.
Wednesday’s testimony about congressional districts focused largely on the Piedmont Triad region and Mecklenburg County.
Hilary Harris Klein, senior counsel for voting rights at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, addresses ta legislative redistricting committee. (Photo: NCGA video stream)Congressional districts in those areas were redrawn to eliminate seats Democrats could win.
Voters’ lawyers said Black voters in Guilford County are no longer able to elect the candidate of their choice because they’re distributed among three districts.
The changes were not the product of partisan gerrymandering, Madduri said.
She said Black voters were more likely than their white counterparts to be moved out of the previous version of 6th Congressional District, which included all of Guilford County.
Black voters were shifted out of the 2022 version of the 14th Congressional District — which included about half of Mecklenburg County and half of Gaston County — and moved into a Charlotte-centric 12th Congressional District for the 2024 election.
“Evidence supports that race was a factor,” she said. “The 2023 plan is worse than the 2022 plan on every metric.”
Under a court-ordered plan used in 2022, North Carolina elected seven Democrats and seven Republicans to Congress. Under the plans Republicans approved in 2023, 10 Republicans and four Democrats were elected to the U.S. House last year.
Hilary Harris Klein, a lawyer for the NC NAACP and Common Cause, said the 2023 configuration of the 1st Congressional District in eastern North Carolina also had a disproportionate impact on Black voters and their ability to elect candidates of their choice.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Don Davis eked out a win in November. The district has elected a Black representative since 1992, when Eva Clayton became the first Black candidate since 1898 to win a US House seat from North Carolina.
The redrawn 2023 version of the district is the first since 1992 to exclude Pitt County, Klein said. Parts of Greenville were removed from the district, she said, and majority-white coastal counties were added.
In the state Senate election map, Republicans divided counties known as the “Black Belt” in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act, Klein said. The region now has one Black state senator when there had been two or three.
Lawyers for GOP cite partisan objectives
McKnight, the Republicans’ lawyer, recounted testimony from Sen. Ralph Hise (R-Mitchell), who said legislators did not use racial data to create the state Senate or congressional maps, but drew districts that would “perform for Republican candidates.”
Hise was co-chair of the Senate Redistricting Committee.
Plaintiffs can’t establish that legislators targeted voters based on race, McKnight said, and are left only with circumstantial evidence.
“A claim based on circumstantial evidence is difficult to prove,” she said. She suggested that the plaintiffs are “dressing up partisan gerrymandering claims in racial garb” because North Carolina courts and federal courts will no longer consider partisan gerrymandering cases.
Plaintiffs contend that state Senate District 8 is racially gerrymandered because legislators created it by moving largely Black neighborhoods in Wilmington out of the New Hanover district and melding those precincts with two more rural counties. The New Hanover cutout is known as the “Wilmington notch.”
McKnight said Hise testified that the district was drawn based on political considerations. She recounted another witness testifying that the New Hanover notch precincts were those that performed the worst for Republicans.
In 2022, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of New Hanover won his race for the seat by 1,710 votes. In 2024, he won by 10,264 votes.
Senate Redistricting Committee co-chair Ralph Hise presides at a recent public hearing (Photo: NCGA video stream)Dueling experts
Since Black voters overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, one of the issues the judges considered was whether voters’ race and their political preferences can be disentangled.
The maps’ challengers turned to Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist and redistricting expert from Stanford University, who used statistical analyses to conclude that even when accounting for party preference, “we see significant effect for race within the contested districts.”
Rodden focused his testimony on congressional districts in the Piedmont Triad and two that include Mecklenburg County.
Rodden testified on the first day of the trial and on the last day, when he defended his analysis from criticism by Republicans’ experts that his methods didn’t show what he claimed.
Sean Trende, a redistricting expert and senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics, said he did not think a technique Rodden used is a “reliable method for detecting racial gerrymanders.”
Rodden said he never uses the term “racial gerrymandering.”
“I can’t tell you what people were thinking in drawing these districts,” Rodden said. “I’m just trying to explain that data.”
Judges Thomas Schroeder, Richard Myers II, and Allison Rushing heard the evidence. All three were appointed by Republican presidents.
They won’t have a decision before early August.
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