North Carolina Court of Appeals (Photo: Clayton Henkel/NC Newsline)
The North Carolina Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit brought by 11 voters challenging partisan gerrymandering in the state, upholding a lower court decision that the objections to the maps raised “non-justiciable political questions.”
Represented by former Republican state Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr, the voters challenged the constitutionality of the 2024 state and federal legislative districts drawn by the General Assembly in 2023 to heavily favor Republicans. They made the case that North Carolina’s constitution contains an implicit promise of fair elections, or its other guarantees of fundamental rights would be meaningless.
In a brief 13-page unpublished opinion released Wednesday, Judge Chris Freeman wrote that because the lawsuit’s central claim is “at its core an allegation that the General Assembly acted to change districts to give one party or group an advantage in the upcoming election,” it lies beyond the authority of the state courts.
“Plaintiffs rely on an unenumerated right to fair elections as the limitation on the General Assembly’s authority to gerrymander on a partisan basis,” Freeman wrote. “Because we review whether the General Assembly violated an express provision of our constitution, plaintiffs’ reliance on an unenumerated right cannot be the basis for an unconstitutional act of the General Assembly.”
Both the U.S. Supreme Court and North Carolina Supreme Court have ruled that the issue of partisan gerrymandering falls outside of their jurisdiction.
The state Court of Appeals also rejected a separate request by legislative leaders to require the plaintiffs pay the state’s attorneys’ fees.
Former state Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr (File photo)The State Board of Elections and the General Assembly’s leadership did not respond to requests for comment.
Orr said in an interview Thursday that the challenge brought “a straightforward constitutional question that the courts have a responsibility historically to decide.”
He said he believes this is the most important case he’s taken part of in his 50 years of practicing law across all levels of the North Carolina court system.
“To have it sort of buried in the dust bin of unpublished opinions with a 13-page slap-dash analysis was pretty discouraging,” Orr said. “I think they were hoping that it would get minimal attention with the decision.”
He said he does not expect his clients to appeal to the state Supreme Court. “The clients and the people that I’ve talked to have no faith that anything will change.”
In the time since the lawsuit was brought, North Carolina unveiled a new congressional map in 2025 drawn with the explicit goal of eliminating one of the state’s four remaining Democratic members of Congress.
Black advocates in NC warn Jim Crow era ‘never ended’ as voting maps shift across South
Orr, who left the Republican Party in 2021, said he is “hugely disappointed” that the state GOP has abandoned the cause of fair elections and equal representation after decades of advocacy for those issues living under a Democratic gerrymander.
“It isn’t about Democrats or Republicans or who wins. It’s about the voters being able to participate in a fair electoral system where the government hasn’t stacked the deck in favor of one side or the other,” Orr said.
He said he does not think anything will change until North Carolinians overcome the state’s skewed maps and elect a legislature made up of members willing to “give up the political power of rigging the elections.”
“Here we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but the whole basis of electoral democracy is that people get to elect their representatives,” he said. “The founders would be spinning in their graves at the thought that the government that they’ve created could now rig the elections as to who gets to serve in the government.”
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