News Clips

The political maps of the past decade have favored rural voters, said Common Cause North Carolina Executive Director Bob Phillips. Rural voters tend to support Republicans, and the maps were drawn to cement Republicans’ power. Plus, he said, many of North Carolina’s most powerful lawmakers are from rural areas themselves. Phillips, who is an advocate for redistricting reform, said he is still trying to convince Republican leaders like them to pass reforms in the next few months, before the 2020 elections. In part, he said, he pitches it as an insurance policy for Republicans in case Democrats do win in 2020. Without reforms to take politics out of the process, Phillips said, Democrats could draw new maps that benefit urban voters as much as the current maps benefit rural voters. “I sometimes talk to those lawmakers and say, ‘The pendulum swings,’” Phillips said. “‘You all know that. And you do not want to ... be left out, potentially, if the pendulum were to swing back.’”

Two more House Republicans have announced their retirement, adding to over a dozen House Republicans that will not be seeking re-election in 2020. Suzanne Almeida from the Common Cause Redistricting Counsel explains what role redistricting may have played in their decision.

The anti-gerrymandering group Common Cause North Carolina was a plaintiff in the lawsuit over the legislative lines, not the congressional lines, but the group’s executive director, Bob Phillips, was in court Monday to watch nevertheless. He said he will continue to push for more permanent reforms at the Legislature, so that future districts can be drawn with “much more robust public input” and potentially avoid so many legal challenges. “I think there’s a lot of room for improvement on transparency,” Phillips said. “Obviously reform in our mind means somebody else besides the lawmakers drawing it.”

“The limited release of Dr. Hofeller’s files has already proven critical in exposing secret efforts to manipulate the census and redistricting,” said Kathay Feng, national redistricting director for Common Cause. “Now the truth can come out about all of Hofeller’s shocking efforts to rig elections in almost every state.”

“Litigation is a hard and painful road,” said Kathay Feng, national redistricting director for Common Cause. The group was a plaintiff in the U.S. Supreme Court case decided in June , which also focused on North Carolina’s congressional map. The goal, Feng said, is to “make changes where each 10 years we’re not facing that same uphill ... climb.”

But to really grasp the impact that gerrymandering has had on abortion laws, you have to look back to 2010, said Dan Vicuña, the national redistricting manager at voting rights watchdog group Common Cause. That election year, Republicans set out to win control of as many statehouses as possible, which gave them power to redraw state and congressional districts after the census. “That effort succeeded beyond their wildest dreams,” Vicuña said. “Republicans took over tons of state legislatures, and they were interested in gerrymandering.” Since then, he said, it’s no surprise that the number of abortion bans passed at the state level has exploded.