How the state supreme court can falter on fair maps, plus the impact of potential census changes: ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

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North Carolina Supreme Court Weighs Reversing Course on Gerrymandering

Last week, the North Carolina Supreme Court reheard argument

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in Harper v. Hall, a case the court decided just last year when it struck down Republican lawmakers’ congressional and legislative maps for unfairly advantaging GOP candidates and thereby violating the state constitution. The court’s decision to rehear an already decided case is highly unusual — something that the high court has done only two other times in the last 30 years (and each previous time on a much more limited and technical issue).

However, after two Republican justices won seats in the 2022 midterms and changed the court’s composition, GOP lawmakers successfully petitioned the court to rehear the case with the aim of having the court reverse course and rule that partisan gerrymandering — no matter how extreme — does not violate the North Carolina Constitution.

The Brennan Center attempted to file a friend-of-the-court brief

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supporting the Court’s original decision to strike down the maps, arguing that the unique majority rule and anti-entrenchment guarantees in state constitutions, like North Carolina’s, have no parallel in the federal constitution and make states important “first-line guarantors of the rights of Americans.” The brief also noted that other courts in states around the country have applied appropriate standards with comparative ease in their rulings striking down partisan gerrymandering by both Democrats and Republicans.

After a heated oral argument

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, it is unclear when the court will release its opinion, but the Brennan Center’s Michael Li told

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the Wall Street Journal that redistricting litigation in state courts is likely to become more common: “People have started to realize that state constitutions have a lot more there in them than people had thought. I do think that the next round of battles is going to be in the state courts and over state courts.”

But the growing number of wins against gerrymandering in state court could produce backlash like current GOP efforts to undo anti-gerrymandering protections in North Carolina. “We live in a time of very existential politics, where people seem to feel like their party hanging onto power is a life and death matter, not just a temporary state of affairs that can be remedied by the next election,” Li says. “I think people will constantly look for opportunities to bring litigation or to force the redrawing of maps.” If so, North Carolina could be an ominous harbinger.



Potential Changes to the 2030 Census

The Census Bureau is already preparing for the 2030 count, which may be the first to implement long sought-after reforms to how the decennial survey asks Americans questions about their race and ethnicity.



Like previous censuses, the 2020 census form required people to answer one question on their race and another, separate question whether they were of Hispanic/Latino origin. The 2020 census also continued the decades old practice of classifying people of Middle Eastern or North African descent as white. Both practices have long been criticized by advocates as confusing to people filling out the census and the source of inaccurate data.



The federal government is proposing simplifying the questionnaire by combining race and ethnicity questions into a single question and adding a separate Middle Eastern and North African category, along the lines shown below.

Source: 88 Fed. Reg. 5381 (January 27, 2023)

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In a new analysis

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, the Brennan Center’s Clara Fong, Kelly Percival, and Thomas Wolf explain the positive benefits proposed changes to race and ethnicity questions will have on future census counts. They write, “This long-awaited overhaul would go a considerable way toward producing data sets that can better serve our increasingly diverse country, and it signals that the federal government is getting more serious about much-needed census reform.”



The Brennan Center’s Mireya Navarro also wrote

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in the Spanish-language La Opinión about how combining race and ethnicity questions in future censuses will increase political representation for Latinos and other people of color, noting that “Census Bureau research

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suggests this would lead more people to declare both their racial and ethnic identities than the separate questions currently do.” (Read the piece in English here

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.)



Map & Litigation Trackers

The Brennan Center has two trackers you can use to keep up with the redistricting cycle: our Redistricting Map Tracker

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contains links to all of the newly passed maps, while our Redistricting Litigation Roundup

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outlines the pending legal cases over new plans.

All told, 73 cases around the country have challenged newly passed congressional or legislative maps as racially discriminatory or partisan gerrymanders (or both) as of March 22. Of these cases, 48 remain pending at the trial or appellate level.



Redistricting in the News

A Wisconsin State Supreme Court election on April 4 will likely decide the court’s ideological makeup. One of the key issues in the race is the high court’s recent role in redistricting

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, with the liberal candidate in the race indicating she would rule differently than the court’s current majority and arguing that the “least-change” approach the court adopted when picking a map last year was not based on the state constitution and unfairly locked in last decade’s pro-Republican gerrymanders.



The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case

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brought by the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP and other groups who claimed that lawmakers diluted the votes of Black voters by confining their political power to only one congressional district. This is the first time in decades where Mississippi legislators drew electoral maps instead of federal judges.



Montana became the last state to enact new legislative districts after its redistricting commission approved final maps

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. However, one Republican legislator wants to change the process for drawing maps in the future, introducing constitutional amendments

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that would transform the state’s redistricting process, including adding a requirement that the legislature to approve final maps.



A new study

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found that Democrats and Republicans increasingly represent very different kinds of districts in the U.S. House of Representatives. For example

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, it found that two-thirds of House districts represented by Republicans have both higher white populations and lower numbers of college educated voters than the national average, while only one-tenth of House districts represented by a Democrat had a similar profile. By contrast, “Democrats now hold a commanding edge over the GOP in seats where the share of residents who are nonwhite, the share of white adults with a college degree, or both, are higher than the level in the nation overall.”



City councilors and county commissioners across the country are either still in the middle of local redistricting or just beginning the legal fights over new maps:

In Boston, several white politicians plan on testifying

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in a federal lawsuit over the city’s new council districts, arguing that the map unfairly divides parts of South Boston, a historically majority-white neighborhood.

California state legislators are advancing several bills

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that would require big cities to use independent commissions to draw electoral maps in future redistricting cycles. The move is driven in part by the controversy that engulfed the Los Angeles City Council

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last year after several councilors were caught on tape making racist remarks in their closed-door redistricting deliberations.

A Tennessee judge declined

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to throw out a lawsuit a local newspaper filed claiming that the Chattanooga City Council violated state open meeting laws when its members met privately with staff to draft a redistricting plan. In its lawsuit, the Chattanooga Times Free Press is requesting that a court oversee the redistricting process next decade to ensure transparency.

In New York City, Asian American advocacy groups have filed a lawsuit

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arguing that the city council’s new district boundaries in Queens violate the city charter because they unfairly divide South Asian communities there. A judgement in the groups’ favor may delay

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the upcoming primary election, currently scheduled for June 27.

In Thurston County, Nebraska, Winnebago and Omaha tribe members have filed a federal lawsuit

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arguing that the new board of supervisors map discriminates against Native voters. The plaintiffs argue that the new map only gives Native voters an opportunity to elect the candidates of their choice in three rather than four of the seven county supervisor districts.



You can find earlier editions of our Redistricting Roundup here

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.









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