Image: The new North Carolina Senate map - Map: N.C. General Assembly
Two federal judges on a three-judge panel were wary of immediately ordering new state Senate districts that Black voters in northeastern North Carolina said illegally weakened Black voting strength.
The voters are appealing a federal district court judge’s decision denying their request to order two Senate districts be redrawn in the state’s Black Belt counties in time for this year’s election. A Fourth Circuit Court three-judge panel heard oral arguments in the appeal Thursday morning.
The voters’ lawsuit says legislators “cracked” the region’s Black population in a way that prevents Black voters from electing the candidates of their choice in violation of federal law.
Federal District Court Judge James Dever III said in his decision last month that lawyers for the voters failed to meet two of the three criteria needed to show vote dilution. Dever agreed with an expert for Republican legislators that racial differences in voting are the result of partisanship, not race.
Elisabeth Theodore, the voters’ lawyer, said Thursday that they presented four pieces of evidence that show “extreme levels of racially polarized voting.”
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who was nominated by former President Ronald Reagan, and Judge Allison Rushing, a nominee of former President Donald Trump, questioned whether Theodore had made the case for the districts to be redrawn for this year and if the election year was too far along to stop and order new district boundaries.
Judge Roger Gregory said legislators clearly split Black voters in the Black Belt and suggested Republicans delayed drawing new districts so that courts would think twice about remedying unconstitutional districts this year. Gregory was a recess appointment by former President Bill Clinton and was nominated by former President George W. Bush.
Gregory said the district boundary was drawn “right through the Black Belt, which has existed in North Carolina for a couple of centuries.”
Voters are challenging Senate District 1 and Senate District 2.
Wilkinson remarked on racial progress in the years since the Voting Rights Act prohibiting discrimination in voting passed in 1965. He questioned whether racially polarized voting is still present in North Carolina when the Lieutenant Governor is a Black Republican, the legislature’s Democratic leaders are Black, and Black candidates win statewide appellate court races.
“It’s the kind of progress of which the South and North Carolina can be proud,” Wilkinson said.
Theodore replied: “North Carolina cannot be proud of these two districts. They literally take the Black Belt and slice it down the middle.”
Questions of racially polarized voting require local appraisals, she said. Northeastern North Carolina isn’t the same as Durham or Charlotte.
Rushing questioned the wisdom of ordering new Senate maps at this point in the election cycle. Early voting in the primaries started Thursday.
Theodore countered that there are no primary contests in the two Senate districts at issue, and that the legislature could change the two districts’ boundaries without disturbing the rest of the Senate map.
Phillip Strach, the lawyer for Republican legislators, told the judges that the changes could not be limited to the two districts.
“We have to protect the voters from disruption,” he said.
In a back-and-forth with Strach, Gregory asked why Republican legislators waited until the end of October to approve new redistricting plans when they could have done it months earlier. He suggested legislators were running out the clock, so courts would be reluctant to overturn their redistricting maps close to the beginning of the 2024 election season.
“You made those timelines tight,” and then argued it’s too late to order changes, Gregory told Strach.
“This would be the death of Section 2, to draw lines so clearly splitting up Black votes in the Black Belt of North Carolina and then to say we did it did on October 25 so that’s too late now for you to stop the process for the 2024 elections.”
Gregory was referring to the section of the federal Voting Rights Act that prohibits vote dilution.
Strach said denying the voters’ request to immediately invalidate the districts would not kill the case. It would continue to a trial where the outcome would apply after the 2024 election, he said.
Gregory disagreed with the suggestion that voters could wait for a remedy.
“Justice delayed is justice denied,” he said. “What we have to do as a federal court is protect statutes that are meant to help protect the rights, many times of the dispossessed and those who are the least able to protect themselves.”
The post Federal judges seem split on ordering new Senate districts Black voters are challenging appeared first on NC Newsline.
