In November 2016, Republican candidates for Congress in North Carolina won about the same share of the vote as Democratic candidates but garnered 10 of 13 of the state’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
On Monday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court in Greensboro, ruled that the map used to outline the districts that each of the seats represented — a map drawn by the GOP-controlled state legislature – favors Republicans in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
“A common thread runs through the restrictions on state election regulations imposed by Article I, the First Amendment, and the Equal Protection Clause: the Constitution does not allow elected officials to enact laws that distort the marketplace of political ideas so as to intentionally favor certain political beliefs, parties, or candidates and disfavor others,” Judge James Wynn wrote for the court.
The 321-page ruling, which Republicans are expected to ask the panel to refrain from applying to the elections scheduled for this November, holds the potential to throw the midterm election into a state of uncertainty.
According to the court, the 14 Democratic voters who filed the lawsuit demonstrated that the 2016 map gave Republican voters a greater say in choosing a member of Congress than voters who favor candidates put forward by rival parties.
The evidence, said the court, showed that Republicans drew the map of legislative districts in ways that diluted the votes of Democrats. They did that by packing Democrats into some districts and “cracking,” or separating, clusters of Democrats in others.
“The division of political subdivisions allowed the General Assembly to achieve its partisan objectives, by packing non-Republican voters in certain districts and submerging non-Republican voters in majority-Republican districts,” wrote Wynn.
The map disfavored a group of voters “based on their prior votes and political association” in violation of the First Amendment,” he added. It also contravened the constitutional requirement that the people – not the states – elect their representatives.
Republicans say they will ask the Supreme Court to stay the ruling. But a stay would require the votes of five justices, and the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy has left the court divided by ideology into two sides of four.
The district court, which is expected to rule on the feasibility of applying its ruling to the midterm election, said it may give the state assembly until Sept. 17 to redraw the map in a way that remedies its deficiencies