Moving Primary target

by | Jan 19, 2022 | Editor's Blog | 2 comments

Republicans in the Senate are voting today to delay the primary yet again. They’re making plans to ensure that they can redraw legislative and Congressional districts in the event that the Supreme Court finds their districts unconstitutional. The current schedule offers only a short window for new districts to be approved under the timeline necessary for a May 17 primary. 

Republicans are concerned that a special master might be called in to draw districts, as has happened in the past. The districts would certainly be fairer and the master would not have to go through a vote process, so he/she could meet the tight deadline. That’s not in the best interest of GOP legislators hoping to increase their majorities in the legislature and Congress. 

All of it gets back to the point of having a better system for determining districts. There’s no perfect way to draw districts and the process will almost certainly be political, but it doesn’t have to be as obviously corrupt as the system we use in North Carolina. We’re now entering our fourth consecutive decade when redistricting dominates the political conversation.

Republicans like to complain that Democrats gerrymandered first. That may be true, but Republicans pledged to operate differently when they got power. And they did. They took gerrymandering to unprecedented extremes with the use of powerful new mapping technology that was unavailable the last time Democrats drew maps. 

That said, Democrats own some of the blame. They had plenty of time to fix the broken redistricting process and didn’t. It’s now time for a bipartisan group of legislators to come together to devise a process for drawing districts that’s less partisan than one we have now. 

Drawing such nakedly partisan districts in a state that’s evenly split insults voters. It’s also anti-democratic at a time when our democracy is threatened. We can do and be better.

2 Comments

  1. Walter Rand

    Thomas, you should discuss the ban on gerrymandering that is already within the NC Constitution. It is the whole county provision which for general assembly districts bans dividing counties in order to make districts. This ban is not followed. Because some counties are so populous, this whole county provision requires multiple-candidate districts. People who have not closely examined this issue like to claim that the Voting Rights Act or the Equal Protection clause prevent NC from following the whole county provision, however neither the VRA nor Equal Protection clause do any such thing. The apparent reason behind political opposition to following the NC Constitution is that following the whole county provision would dramatically increase the chances for third-party candidates to become legislators. For example, imagine a NC House district with 4 seats up for election, all within the same district. The 4 candidates with the most votes win the seats. Any individual candidate with 20% + 1 vote is guaranteed to be in the top 4 (it isn’t mathematically possible for 4 other candidates to have more or even the same number of votes as a candidate with 20% + 1 vote). Any minority group with enough members to garner 20% + 1 vote gets their candidate in office. This diminishes the power of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, so this constitutional ban on dividing counties is not followed in spite of being clearly the law. The whole county provisions are in NC Constitution Article II, sections 3(3) and 5(3).

  2. bremerjennifer

    There’s a pretty good chance that the demographic shift underway in NC will make redistricting reform more attractive to the Rs sometime later in the decade, provided that the Ds don’t screw up their efforts to increase Latinx registration and strengthen their ties to that critical part of the electorate (or suffer more deterioration of Black males’ support). In my view, the Ds have a ways to go to meet the latter requirements, however. What do you think?

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