New York Times: The Battle Over the Files of a Gerrymandering Mastermind

At the heart of a decisive court ruling on Tuesday striking down North Carolina’s state legislative maps was evidence culled from the computer backups of the man who drew them: Thomas B. Hofeller, the Republican strategist and master of gerrymandering, who died last year.

Documents from the backups, which surfaced after his death, were also central to the legal battle over adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census. An enormous stash of digital files, covering Mr. Hofeller’s work in almost every state, has yet to be examined.

But in a state court in Raleigh, N.C., another courtroom battle is underway. Its aim is to ensure that those files are never publicly scrutinized. …

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A lawyer for Mr. Oldham, Robert N. Hunter Jr., declined to comment on the dispute, citing North Carolina legal guidelines. But a senior official at Common Cause North Carolina, the public-interest organizing group that helped bring the successful suit against the state’s legislative maps, argued that the public interest demanded that Mr. Hofeller’s digital archive be open to scrutiny.

“We’ve already seen that these files have been instrumental in exposing lies around the effort to add a citizenship question to the census and around subverting a court’s order to redraw gerrymandered lines,” Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director for the group, said in an interview.

“The Hofeller files are important because they’re the only thing that will allow the American people to know the truth behind the efforts to rig redistricting and elections,” she added. “They have to be made public.” …

At issue are four hard drives and 18 thumb drives, comprising years of backups of Mr. Hofeller’s computer, that came to public attention only by the oddest of coincidences. Stephanie Hofeller, Mr. Hofeller’s estranged daughter, found the drives while visiting her mother after the strategist’s death in August 2018. While searching for a lawyer to handle estate issues, Ms. Hofeller mentioned the backups in passing to an official at Common Cause North Carolina.

The state’s Republican leaders have excoriated Ms. Hofeller over her actions. “Dr. Hofeller, of course, would not have willingly handed all his files to his political and legal opponents,” they wrote in a brief. “Most of the documents were not Mrs. Hofeller’s to give. Dr. Hofeller created and possessed them as an agent for his clients, so even he lacked the authority to turn them over without their authorization.”

Lawyers for Common Cause subpoenaed the backups early this year and discovered political bombshells: Documents in the North Carolina gerrymandering lawsuit appeared to indicate that Republican leaders had lied to a federal court in 2017 about their reliance on racial demographics to create the legislative map that was invalidated on Tuesday. (The leaders have denied the accusations; the state court called their explanation “not credible.”)