Gerrymandering/Redistricting

"To give absolute power to one branch of government, unbound by state constitutions, would lead us down a dangerous road to tyranny," asserted Kathay Feng, national redistricting director for Common Cause, which is opposing the position of the North Carolina GOP lawmakers in the case. 

The major voting rights case is scheduled for oral arguments in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 7.

Kathay Feng, who leads anti-gerrymandering efforts for the national group Common Cause, calls it “the case of the century” — and not out of admiration. “It is a case that asserts a bizarre and fabricated reading of the United States Constitution ... to create a situation where elections are already rigged from the start,” she said.

Good-government groups such as Common Cause have been going after gerrymanders in both Democratic and Republican states for some time. The Supreme Court, in a 2019 case, held that federal courts can’t hear claims of partisan gerrymandering. The Court said that there’s just no standard to apply, and so federal courts are closed—there are other ways of dealing with these problems. Some states have created redistricting commissions; others have state courts that have policed partisan gerrymandering. That’s what happened in Moore v. Harper. After Common Cause lost in the U.S. Supreme Court, the group argued before the state Supreme Court in North Carolina that partisan gerrymandering violates the state constitution, and they won on that claim. The state Supreme Court ordered North Carolina to redraw its districts, to make them a little fairer in a state that is pretty evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.

Pundits who focused on Democratic versus Republican battles before the election missed the real story — that fairly drawn voting maps boosted turnout and elevated voter choices in places like California, Colorado and North Carolina. The inspiring turnout of young people, women and people of color in the midterm elections came because people’s interests, and not politicians, were put first in redistricting. We saw this in Michigan, where University of Michigan students stood in line hours into the frigid night because they knew their votes mattered. But our democracy is fragile. On December 7, the Supreme Court will hear Moore v. Harper, which stemmed from Common Cause’s fight for responsive voting maps in North Carolina. The court will decide if state legislatures can rig voting maps and elections without facing the checks and balances of state courts.

There is no legal basis to upend our nation's long-standing system of having checks and balances in place for our elections processes.