Center for Public Integrity: In North Carolina, GOP legislature wants control over federal elections

Voting rights in North Carolina hinge on the balance of powers between the three branches of government.

For now, North Carolina residents have broad access to voting beyond showing up at the polls on Election Day. They can cast an absentee ballot by mail without having to provide a reason, or vote early in person during a two-week period.

North Carolina Republicans have attempted to pass sweeping changes to election law since they gained control of the state legislature in 2011, but have been widely rebuffed by state and federal courts for targeting Black and Democratic voters for disenfranchisement through restrictions to voting access and gerrymandering. For most of the 2010 decade, North Carolina’s legislature was elected using Republican-drawn legislative maps that state and federal courts later ruled were unconstitutional.

Since Republicans lost super-majority control of the legislature in 2018, their attempts to pass restrictive election laws on party-line votes have been hampered by vetoes from the state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. …

Now, North Carolina’s Republican legislative leaders are trying to limit the authority of state courts to review federal election laws in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that could fundamentally shift the way democracy is structured across this country. …

The case, Moore v. Harper, arose out of a lawsuit in state court where Democratic Party-backed groups, such as the National Redistricting Foundation, and pro-democracy groups, such as Common Cause, sued the legislature claiming their redistricted maps for state and federal offices were gerrymandered. The groups argued that the state’s constitution prevented extreme partisan gerrymandering.

In February 2022, the state supreme court agreed. The three Republican justices — North Carolina elects appellate justices in partisan races due to a 2018 law passed by a Republican legislature — dissented, writing the majority “untethers itself from history and case law” in using the state constitution to limit partisan gerrymandering. Two of the seven court seats, both currently held by Democratic justices, are up for election this year. …

After the state supreme court’s ruling, the state legislature had to redraw its state House, state Senate and U.S. Congressional districts under the supervision of a three-judge panel in Superior Court. Those judges decided the state districts were acceptable but the congressional map was still gerrymandered, so the court provided its own map for 2022 and said the legislature could redraw the maps for the next election.

Moore and Berger appealed this decision up to the U.S. Supreme Court and relied on an argument called the “independent state legislature theory.” Should at least five justices support the theory and North Carolina’s Republicans win their case, state courts will have less authority to review federal election rules set by state legislatures, though what this would look like in practice is widely variable and depends entirely on the ruling.

In their filing before the U.S. Supreme Court, Moore and Berger argued that state courts should have no role in reviewing election laws for federal elections set by state legislatures, and that those laws should not be subject to gubernatorial veto, either.