Gerrymandering/Redistricting

Tuesday’s meeting was the sixth in a series of 19 statewide town halls sponsored by the good-government advocacy group Common Cause North Carolina. Several years ago in Raleigh, Moral Mondays protesters descended on the Legislative Building to protest the legislature’s actions. That movement faded during the COVID pandemic. Now Common Cause is seeking to rally people where they live. Gino Nuzzolillo, a 25-year-old staffer at Common Cause, conceived the town hall series and led the one at Gibsonville. “We can’t keep going to Raleigh,” he said. “We have to build a base in other places.” Across the state, Common Cause said more than 30 local advocacy groups have joined the effort.

“Look, the conservatives sowed this,” Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause-Wisconsin, observes of the bad blood on the Court. “They sowed discord.” “What’s happening now is a direct result of conservatives’ decision they’d take all this underground and not meet in public,” says Heck. Given their track record, “If conservatives were the new majority there would be no question about what they’d do,” Heck adds. “They’d name a conservative chief justice and say, ‘We have a 4-3 majority, try to stop us.’” Unlike the conservatives who pushed out Abrahamson, however, the new progressive majority has stopped short of trying to replace Ziegler. Still, Heck has heard from people who worry that the new majority is being too bold and assertive. “Progressives are not really like that. We’re always saying, ‘Let’s do the right thing and the fair thing,’” he says.

Common Cause North Carolina’s Bob Phillips called the ruling “the worst decision, perhaps, the state Supreme Court has ever made.” In her dissent, Justice Anita Earls wrote that “today’s result was preordained on 8 November 2022, when two new members of this Court were elected to establish this Court’s conservative majority.”

Common Cause interim co-president Marilyn Carpinteyro on Tuesday sent a letter to all members of Congress on behalf of her group and its more than 1.5 million members and supporters "in strong support of the Freedom to Vote Act and in strong opposition to the 'American Confidence in Elections' (ACE) Act," which was introduced by House Republicans earlier this month. "The ACE Act is a giant step backward and would silence the voices of everyday Americans by putting up barriers to voting and by allowing millions of dollars more in secret money to infiltrate our political system," Carpinteyro wrote. "To strengthen free and fair elections and help get big, secret money out of politics, Congress must instead pass the Freedom to Vote Act."

Some groups argue L.A. shouldn’t pick a number, but rather set the ideal level of representation. California Common Cause, a good-government advocacy organization, has urged the city to create 150,000-resident districts — the equivalent of 27 districts based on current population — and allow the number of districts to rise or fall every 10 years with population changes. A hybrid system has some potential pitfalls, warned Kathay Feng with Common Cause.  “I do think you can have a mixed system if the at-large seats are coupled with methods of casting ballots that give minority communities an ability to vote with greater voter representation,” such as ranked-choice voting, Feng added.

Officials from Common Cause California, a good government advocacy group that is co-sponsoring AB 1248 and AB 764, said they’re excited to see the “groundswell of support” for independent redistricting this year. “There are some technical amendments to do to make sure the bills don’t conflict with each other,” said Laurel Brodzinsky, legislative director for the organization. “But definitely on a policy level, it’s really exciting to see.”