10.19.2017- NC Senator Gladys A. Robinson Newsletter

Guilford County Updates Redistricting Hearing Held In Greensboro Lawyers for aggrieved voters challenged 12 revised districts last Thursday resulting from the North Carolina General Assembly’s efforts this summer to fix problems with racial gerrymandering. In a four-hour hearing at the L. Richardson Preyer Federal Building and Court House downtown, they claimed that at least four of those revised districts still were unconstitutionally gerrymandered along racial lines.

Two of the more disputed districts in the voting rights case are in Guilford County, seats now held by state Rep. Pricey Harrison (D-Greensboro) and Sen. Gladys Robinson (D-High Point). The hearing was before that same panel and aimed to determine whether new election districts that state legislators drew this summer had fixed those problems. The judges heard lengthy legal arguments from both sides before adjourning and saying they would rule later.

The judges entered an order shortly after the hearing directing both sides to submit “the names of at least three persons the parties agree are qualified to serve as a special master.” A special master is an administrator that judges appoint to oversee certain aspects of a lawsuit; perhaps, in this case, redrawing election districts that the court decides legislators failed to get right after two tries. The order advised only that the names should be submitted by Wednesday “to avoid delay should the court decide that some or all of the plaintiffs’ objections should be sustained.”

The hearing was held before the same trio of judges who ruled last year that the Republican-led legislature had erred in drawing the original maps in 2011 because legislators used race as a key factor and packed too many black voters in a relatively small number of districts. The judges ruled those districts ran afoul of voting rights laws in diluting the overall impact of black voters, who tend to vote Democrat, by concentrating their numbers in those few districts at levels well beyond the point at which their ballots would be decisive.

Lawyers for the 31 voters who filed the successful lawsuit against the flawed districts did not challenge all of the redrawn districts on racial grounds. They argued that in some of the allegedly flawed, new districts state legislators had stepped beyond their authority by needlessly redrawing districts other than the 28 cited as being unconstitutional gerrymanders in the judges' initial order.

Harrison’s district anchored in Greensboro was one where legislators allegedly had not only failed to improve the racial demographics, but actually made them worse in its new version. The district went from a “black voting age population” of just under 51 percent in its original, unconstitutional version to almost 61 percent in the supposedly repaired edition, the plaintiffs argued in a recent petition. The petition noted Harrison’s supposedly reformed district has “the highest total BVAP (black voting age population) percentage of any House or Senate district in the state.”

Senator Robinson’s and Rep. Harrison’s districts were two of four statewide in which racial gerrymandering problems had not been remedied, the plaintiffs contend. The other two districts with racial demographics still allegedly out of whack are located in the Fayetteville and Goldsboro areas, they argue. The other, eight districts remaining in dispute violate the state Constitution by breaking that document’s limits on needlessly redrawing districts “mid-decade,” arbitrarily splitting counties apart into separate districts, and sprawling across the landscape instead of being as compact as possible, Southern Coalition lawyer Anita Earls maintained.

AS REPORTED BY NEWS & RECORD