North Carolina Republican legislators held hearings on several pieces of legislation on Thursday that would ostensibly reform redistricting, but the bills (HB 140, HB 69, and HB 648) include provisions that raise serious doubts as to whether they would actually prevent another decade of GOP gerrymanders. Instead, they're likely efforts to put window dressing on measures that would enshrine an unfair Republican advantage in the state constitution.
One problematic provision would open the door to allowing redistricting based on the adult citizen population instead of the traditional total population, which the Trump administration and Republicans would prefer so that they can undermine Democratic representation and Latino voting power. The criteria for drawing districts also overly rely on compactness and bar the use of partisan data to ensure maps are fair, two factors that would likely perpetuate the GOP's unmerited advantage even without intentional gerrymandering.
Another provision of HB 140, which would amend the state constitution, would shift the drawing of maps to the Legislative Services Office, which is headed by a partisan Republican appointed by GOP legislative leaders. The LSO's chief could draw new gerrymanders without any public oversight, and a toothless bipartisan advisory commission would only hold hearings after the fact. From there, legislators would vote on the LSO's maps, but they could also still draw their own gerrymandered maps.
The amendment's harmful provisions don't stop there. The measure would also guarantee legislators control over redistricting local governments, something Republican legislators have repeatedly done this decade and lost numerous lawsuits over.
Furthermore, it adds to the state constitution a doctrine created by the state Supreme Court in a 2003 ruling called Stephenson v. Bartlett. North Carolina's constitution states, "No county shall be divided in the formation of a [legislative] district," which conflicts with federal requirements that all districts have roughly equal population.
The court's Republican majority at the time invented a complicated formula to reconcile these otherwise irreconcilable mandates. This formula places heavy restrictions on which counties may be combined with others when drawing legislative districts, permitting even combinations that violate the integrity of communities of interest.
Even though the GOP's legislative gerrymanders were struck down last month, the plaintiffs did not try to challenge the so-called Stephenson rule, even though the state Supreme Court now has a 6-1 Democratic majority. Leaving the existing county combinations in place limits how the new maps could preserve communities of interest. Notably, communities of interest—a key criteria that most nonpartisan mapmakers seek to adhere to—aren't even protected in the new legislation.
Lastly, while the bills nominally prohibit those working on redistricting from disfavoring a political party, they contain no enforcement mechanism aside from costly litigation that can take years to resolve. Furthermore, such claims could be more difficult to prove now that the GOP has learned from its mistakes this decade and will try to better hide its partisan intent. And of course, any such challenges could simply be rejected if Republicans regain their majority on the state Supreme Court.
Despite these major flaws, some of the bills have Democratic support, which Republicans would need in order to put a constitutional amendment on the 2020 primary ballot. However, until Republicans come to the table with a genuine bipartisan reform bill like as some of the others that Democrats have proposed, Democrats should oppose all of the GOP's bills.