North Carolina racial gerrymandering struck down

[Lion Heart 15,041]

About two weeks ago, a federal appeals court struck down many key provisions of a comprehensive voter suppression law enacted by North Carolina’s GOP-controlled legislature. The court’s opinion was brutal, calling these lawmakers out for using data on racial voting patterns in an intentional effort to construct a law that would prevent many African-Americans from voting.

On Wednesday, North Carolina Republicans received another raft of bad news from a federal court — a three-judge panel struck down the state legislative maps as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Although the court’s opinion in Covington v. North Carolina is considerably less harsh in tone than the Fourth Circuit’s opinion halting much of the state’s voter suppression law, the loss of these maps is still a blow to Republicans.

In 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney won North Carolina’s electoral votes by only a two-point margin over President Obama. Yet the state legislative maps proved so favorable to Republicans that the GOPcaptured a supermajority of both houses of the state legislature.

As election law expert Rick Hasen notes, Covington “follows a familiar pattern in these racial gerrymandering cases: a Republican legislature draws district lines to give the party an advantage by packing minority voters into a smaller number of districts.”

As the court lays out, legislative leaders instructed private counsel hired to draw the state’s maps to “more than triple the number of majority-black General Assembly districts, from nine to thirty four.” On the surface, this may sound like good news for minority representation. Yet, by packing African-Americans into relatively few districts, the state minimized black voters’ ability to influence elections in other parts of the state, and prevented them from forming coalitions with non-black voters that could potentially give them greater representation in the legislature.

Because African-American voters overwhelmingly tend to prefer Democrats over Republicans, minimizing the influence of black voters also increased the GOP’s power relative to Democrats.

https://thinkprogress.org/breaking-north-carolinas-state-legislative-districts-struck-down-as-a-racial-gerrymander-1de42efeb2db#.heyciawm9

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I don't understand most of this  but I can tell you, my state sucks and them being awful doesn't surprise me.