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A federal trial concerning whether congressional and legislative voting districts drawn by the Republican-led N.C. General Assembly diminishes Black voting strength, got underway this week in Winston-Salem before a three-judge panel.
The trial addresses two consolidated federal lawsuits, filed originally in December 2023, that challenged redistricting maps then, but were allowed by judges to be used in the 2024 general election.
Plaintiffs argued that the maps were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.
If the court ultimately agrees with Black plaintiffs, in addition to the state NAACP and Common Cause, that six of 14 congressional districts, nine of 120 state House districts, and five of 50 N.C. Senate districts were redrawn so that Black voters were eliminated or shifted in order to increase the likelihood of more Republicans being elected, then the three-judge panel could order the N.C. General Assembly to redraw the voting maps for the 2026 elections.
In the legislative case, some plaintiffs’ claims were thrown out of court in an April ruling, specifically dealing with N.C. Senate districts in Mecklenburg and New Hanover counties, along with state House districts in Wake and Forsyth counties, but the rest of the plaintiffs’ claims were allowed to proceed.
Republicans “unlawfully diluted the power of Black voters on account of race in North Carolina’s historic Black Belt Senate Districts 1 and 2 in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” alleged the plaintiff’s brief.
The N.C. NAACP also alleged in its lawsuit that the racial gerrymandering was “intentional” discrimination in violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
Per the congressional district map, plaintiffs allege the map “eliminates two Black opportunity districts by cracking and packing Black voters in the Piedmont Triad and in Mecklenburg County.” Plaintiffs further charge that Republican lawmakers’ actions were “intentionally discriminatory under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA).”
“…[R]ace was a motivating factor in creating the 2023 Congressional Plan (‘2023 Plan’)…,” plaintiffs claimed, “… and in the decisions to move Black voters into and out of former Congressional Districts 6, 12, and 14, which dilutes their voting power and cannot be explained by purely partisan goals.”
But Republican legislative leaders, in their legal briefs to the court, maintained as they always have that race was never a dominant factor in their redrawing the voting maps, calling that argument “implausible.”
Citing a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Rucho v. Common Cause, attorneys for Republican legislative leaders replied that plaintiffs would “…‘repackage a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim by exploiting the tight link between race and political preference’ and thereby ‘sidestep [the] holding in Rucho that partisan-gerrymandering claims are not justiciable. To prevent this, the Court held that racial-intent claims will typically require direct evidence of racial motive and that claims based on circumstantial evidence cannot succeed unless the challenger is able “to disentangle race from politics.”
“The General Assembly ‘made the laudable effort to disregard race altogether in the redistricting process,” GOP legislative leaders continued. “Plaintiffs cannot prove a motive that did not exist.”
If the three-judge federal panel does ultimately side with the plaintiffs and orders the redistricting maps redrawn for the 2026 legislative races, it will have to be mindful of the upcoming election calendar deadlines.
Candidate filing for statewide primary elections begins on December 1st, ending on December 19th. Absentee ballots will be sent out beginning Jan. 13, 2026 for the March 3rd, 2026 primaries.
