Fair vote is too sacred for rushed judgment

It’s hardly surprising that Democrats would complain about North Carolina’s new congressional and legislative districts. They were drawn by Republicans and are shaped in a way that almost guarantees the GOP will do better than it did under the old maps.

If that were all there was to it, Democrats should be told: Too bad. Republicans won control of the General Assembly in 2010, and to the victors go the spoils. Of course Republicans would draw lines that help them. It was their first shot at drawing the maps in over 100 years. Democrats did the same thing for decades when they were in power.

But that’s not all there is to it. Challenges to the new districts, which will be considered at a court hearing in Raleigh today, are built on statistical evidence that says mapmakers used race as a predominant factor, and to an extent that they violated the U.S. Constitution.

Such concerns seemed to be undercut when the Obama Justice Department approved the N.C. maps in November, indicating that they did not illegally dilute blacks’ voting power. Sen. Bob Rucho, a Mecklenburg Republican who co-chaired the redistricting effort, and others pointed to that as proof that the districts were fair and legal.

The courts, however, have disagreed with the Justice Department frequently over the years. And opponents have now presented voluminous statistical analysis that suggests the courts should take a closer look.

Among the most notable: An affidavit filed last week by Ted Arrington, a former UNC Charlotte political science department chairman and a nationally recognized expert on redistricting.
Arrington dove into a block-by-block, precinct-by-precinct analysis of the maps. He determined that mapmakers systematically packed blacks into heavily black districts, leaving other districts safer for whites and Republicans. Rucho and co-chair Rep. David Lewis led an effort to split hundreds of precincts, siphoning black voters off with other black voters, and white voters off with other white ones, Arrington found.

“The General Assembly has created in all three plans a kind of political apartheid,” Arrington wrote.

He called the precinct-splitting patterns “a direct attack on black political participation.”
This can hardly be dismissed as the whining of some out-of-sorts liberal. Arrington was a long-time Republican and has been retained as an expert witness in 41 voting rights cases all over the country. His findings over the years have helped each party.

If you’ve read this far, you probably already appreciate why this is all vitally important and not just inside baseball. Election results hinge largely not on who’s the best candidate but how the lines are drawn. A well-qualified Republican almost certainly won’t win in a heavily Democratic district, and vice-versa. So fair, legal redistricting is essential to a healthy democracy.

A three-judge panel in Wake County Superior Court today will hear the state’s request that the case be thrown out and elections held under the disputed maps. That would be premature. The questions raised by Arrington and others are significant, and deserve a full hearing. The court should deny the state’s motion and lay the groundwork for making a decision based on the merits of both sides.

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