McClatchy: Too late to redraw NC’s congressional districts for 2018 election, plaintiffs agree

It is too late to redraw North Carolina’s congressional districts for the 2018 election despite a court ruling them unconstitutional, the winners in the state’s partisan gerrymandering case said Friday.

The state chapters of Common Cause and The League of Women Voters won their gerrymandering case on Monday, but on Friday they wrote to the federal judges who had ruled for them that the November election is too soon to try to draw new maps.

“Attempting to impose a new districting plan in time for the 2018 election would be too disruptive and potentially counterproductive,” they wrote, adding that they reached their conclusion “with utmost frustration and regret.”

However, the three-judge panel isn’t required to use their suggestion, or the suggestion from the defendants in the case, which was also filed Friday. …

“Unfortunately, the General Assembly’s decision to draw a biased and gerrymandered map in 2016 allowed them to run out the clock and force North Carolinians to vote in unconstitutional districts one more time,” Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina said in a statement. “Although justice will be delayed one more election cycle, we will keep up the fight for fair representation here in North Carolina and across the country when this case heads to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The plaintiffs said they expected the Attorney General Josh Stein to file a brief with the court agreeing that “the risk of disruption and voter confusion is too great” to redraw districts at this point.

The plaintiffs had asked that the court rule 12 of North Carolina’s 13 districts — all but the 5th District — and the entire 2016 Plan as a whole “unconstitutional, null and void” and that the court stop the state from conducting any primary or general elections under the current map after Nov. 6.

If the judges don’t accept the plaintiffs’ plan to let the elections go forward using the current maps, they could use one of the remedies they suggested in their ruling, including having the current candidates run in November in newly drawn districts. If that happens, there will be a fight over who gets to draw the maps.

Normally that’s the legislature’s job, but the plaintiffs want the authority given instead to an outside expert, they wrote Friday, and on Monday the judges did note that they planned to hire one just in case they “conclude the General Assembly is not entitled to such an opportunity or we conclude that the remedial plan enacted by the General Assembly fails to remedy the constitutional violation.”