News Clips

“If the justices in Washington, D.C., won’t protect people’s constitutional rights — won’t ensure that all voters have a fair opportunity to participate in our democracy — then the courts of North Carolina will fix the problem themselves,” said Stanton Jones, a chief lawyer in the lawsuit filed by Common Cause, the state Democratic Party and Democratic voters.

Just this week, a unanimous three-judge panel in North Carolina struck down that state’s legislative district maps saying they were unfairly drawn to benefit Republicans -- in violation of the state constitution.The “decision offers a framework for other states to evaluate their own redistricting,” said Stanton Jones, a constitutional lawyer at the firm Arnold & Porter in Washington, D.C. representing Common Cause. “There are a number of other state constitutions around the country with free elections clauses similar or identical to the one in North Carolina.”A challenge to Pennsylvania’s congressional map brought by the League of Women Voters reached a similar conclusion last year, with that state’s Supreme Court finding the gerrymandered districts violated state law.The cases show that “state constitutions can be invoked to protect the people of that state,” said Kathay Feng, national redistricting director at Common Cause.

Dan Vicuña Common Cause's national redistricting manager said the organization is already looking toward 2021, identifying where partisan gerrymandering may take place and where state constitutions might give them an opening to challenge it."It’s going to be an exciting time for voter empowerment after the next lines are drawn. We have a good handle on where there’s going to be single-party control, where the state constitution has been interpreted in a pro-voter matter, where we can ask the court to change precedent where that’s the case."

“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.”

“Our heads are spinning here in North Carolina,” said Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, which filed the suit. “It’s a huge win, particularly for the voters of North Carolina, just to know that this entire decade they have never had an opportunity to actually vote for legislators in constitutional districts.”

Common Cause, the nonprofit government watchdog group that filed the lawsuit, called Tuesday’s ruling “a historic victory for the people of North Carolina.”“The court has made clear that partisan gerrymandering violates our state’s constitution and is unacceptable,” Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, said in a statement. “Thanks to the court’s landmark decision, politicians in Raleigh will no longer be able to rig our elections through partisan gerrymandering.”