Gannett/Wilmington Star News: Are Black voters in North Carolina at risk with redistricting maps under litigation? NAACP, Common Cause and NC voters sue Republican legislatures for racially gerrymandered maps
Gannett/Wilmington Star News: Are Black voters in North Carolina at risk with redistricting maps under litigation? NAACP, Common Cause and NC voters sue Republican legislatures for racially gerrymandered maps
Bob Phillips, the executive director at Common Cause North Carolina, said in an interview that minority communities, like the Black community, will not get to choose representation that they see fit and that will impact how and if their communities’ needs get met.
Phillips, who has been with the organization since 2001, has seen years of gerrymandering, but believes that in recent years the issue has gotten worse. This isn’t necessarily a partisan problem, Phillips said, rather a problem of whoever is currently in power.
“Twenty years ago, Democrats were gerrymandering, not quite as robustly as they are now because they didn’t have the technology for one, but they were in charge of drawing the maps and Democrats at the time had no inclination to consider redistricting reform,” Phillips said. “The irony was I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Republicans in North Carolina calling for redistricting reform when the Democrats were in charge. Fast forward to today and it’s reversed.”
Phillips said North Carolina’s purple reputation doesn’t show up in the current General Assembly and it may not in the upcoming election either.
“I think the maps will reflect gerrymandering versus the actual facts that we are a highly competitive, very much almost evenly divided political state,” Phillips said. “We may see out of 14 congressional seats, an 11-3 split and that’s hardly evenly balanced like we have now.”
Litigation is merely a band-aid, Phillips said. The only long-term solution is redistricting reform, he said.
“North Carolina, as any other state that faces gerrymandering issues, really can’t get out of this problem until we have a whole brand new redistricting process, a better way of drawing the maps,” Phillips said. “And first and foremost, in our minds, it starts with getting the map making out of the hands of lawmakers and putting it to an independent redistricting commission made up of citizens that includes Independents, Democrats, Republicans and is reflective of this state in gender, race and geography.”
Being that North Carolina is not a ballot initiative state, redistricting reform would have to be passed by the legislature. Phillips said he is waiting for a highly contested race where voters can demand that legislators promise to pass redistricting reform and then hold them to their word when in office.