News Clips

Catherine Turcer, director of Common Cause Ohio and a longtime anti-gerrymandering advocate, praised the ruling. "Today's ruling is clear: gerrymandered maps have no place in the state of Ohio," Turcer said in a statement. "Now that the Ohio Redistricting Commission is back to square one, we ask that they finally stop and listen to the voters' demands for a fair redistricting process."

“Today’s ruling is an unequivocal win for North Carolina’s Black voters who were most harmed by this extreme partisan gerrymander,” Allison Riggs, a lawyer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said in a statement. Riggs represented Common Cause. “At every level, North Carolina’s GOP leadership diluted representation of communities of color to entrench their own political power in ways that were both obvious and egregious,” her statement said.

Attorney Allison Riggs, who is representing plaintiff Common Cause in the redistricting case, says that even though the state constitution doesn’t explicitly require fair elections, case law clearly does. “I’ve certainly studied the history,” she said, “and there is not a suggestion anywhere that the failure to put ‘fair’ in the constitution means that there's a presupposition that elections will be run unfairly.” Riggs says constitutional provisions have to be understood together in context. “In cases interpreting free elections, there's frequently also an equal protection claim associated with that that really talks about how we have to treat people equally and fairly,” Riggs said. “Sometimes you can miss the forest for the trees.”

Meanwhile, Common Cause New York Executive Director Susan Lerner called for public hearings on maps she called a “major disservice to the voters.” “The Legislature’s proposed congressional maps preserve the Voting Rights Act districts, but the rest of the lines are so heavily gerrymandered they will be non-competitive,” she said.

Kathay Feng, a redistricting expert at Common Cause, said the massive growth in communities of color over the past decade means that their representation should have grown, not shrunk. “It’s a falsehood for political pundits or operatives to say status quo is sufficient,” she said. “You can’t force your 12-year-old to continue wearing the clothes of a 2-year-old. It’s pretending like they haven’t grown.”

“I view the court process as a continuation of the redistricting process,” says Kathay Feng, the national redistricting manager of Common Cause. Unfortunately, some states don’t seem to mind being sued. North Carolina’s maps were among those struck down in the last cycle. Yet, Feng says its lawmakers again approved maps that already are being challenged in new lawsuits. “They cracked and packed Black voters, resulting in the dilution of their votes,” says Feng of North Carolina’s most recent maps, referring to practices in which communities of color are “cracked,” or split up to reduce their political power, or “packed” into the same district in greater numbers than necessary to reduce their power in surrounding districts. “They held sham hearings where locations were moved or, in one instance, the doors to the building were locked. All in all, a bad process.”