News Clips

If a liberal flips the court’s open seat, progressive groups will attempt to relitigate the issue and urge the new majority to strike down the current map, Jay Heck, the executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, told CNN. Heck and other voter advocates objected to the court’s conservative majority deciding to use maps drawn by Republicans in 2011 as the foundation for the maps it considered following the 2020 census.

We know those who penned our Constitution in 1787 were unequivocal about the importance of putting checks and balances into every level of government and vesting power in the people. It was essential to the Founders to guard against any one person, group or political party seizing control in a way that undermines public will. If our Supreme Court justices ignore 250-plus years of legal precedent, they’ll also be setting the stage for election pandemonium: One set of rules for state and local elections and another for congressional and presidential elections. Imagine, as a voter, having to figure out where and when to vote to cast a ballot for president and then finding out you need to vote at a different time and place while choosing your next governor.

Some of these asymmetries stem from state legislators’ decision to exempt local governments from the laws they passed. Kathay Feng, an advocate at the voting rights organization Common Cause, said this may have been a tactic in some states to avoid paying the cost of local changes, or to sidestep conflicts with “home rule” laws that give localities wide latitude.

The Republican majority on the court also threw out a petition filed earlier this week by redistricting lawsuit plaintiff Common Cause urging that the GOP requests be denied and the ruling remain intact. The advocacy group, which argued the rehearing request was improper, is “disappointed the Court is giving legislators another bite at the apple,” said Hilary Klein, an attorney who filed the Common Cause motion.

Hilary Klein, an attorney for Common Cause, wrote that the rehearing petition is “frivolous.” She referred specifically to House Speaker Tim Moore’s public statement that another look at the cases was needed because the “people of North Carolina sent a message election day” to reject the ruling of the “outgoing (judicial) majority.” The petition “is therefore motivated by improper purpose and grossly lacking in the requirements of propriety,” Klein wrote.

“It’s a state by state fight,” Dan Vicuna, the national redistricting manager of Common Cause, a voting rights organization, told Yahoo News. “In this country, there's a long history of using the redistricting process to discriminate against people of color or to discriminate against voters of one party.” According to voting rights advocates, a wave of racial gerrymandering is impacting maps across the country. The 2020 U.S Census Bureau reported that the overall racial diversity of the United States increased since 2010, and the Black population was the most prevalent in parts of the South. “But just because communities of color may drive population growth, that doesn't mean they have a seat at the table,” Dan Vicuna, the national redistricting manager of Common Cause, a national organization fighting for fair redistricting, told Yahoo News. “Unfortunately, in this country, there's a long history of elected officials in power using that power to either pack Black, Latino, Native American Asian voters into as few districts as possible or alternatively cracking those communities to spread voters throughout a bunch of different districts, so they have no power in any one district.”