News Clips

"These maps intentionally discriminate against Georgians of color by silencing our voices at the ballot box," Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, the lead plaintiff in the case, said in a statement.

“The evidence clearly showed that Republican legislative leaders brazenly ignored legal requirements designed to protect voting rights for Black North Carolinians,” the group’s executive director, Bob Phillips, said in a statement. “If allowed to stand, these extreme gerrymanders would cause profound and lasting harm to the people of our state.”

“We are confident that the people of North Carolina will ultimately prevail in our fight for fair maps,” Bob Phillips with the state affiliate of Common Cause — one of the lawsuits’ plaintiffs — said after the ruling’s release.

“This is absolutely a regression from what we already have,” said Khalif Ali, the head of Common Cause Pennsylvania, a nonpartisan good-government group. “When I was reading through it, I was just amazed.”

ATLANTA (AP) — Voting rights groups and individual voters on Friday filed a federal lawsuit that says the new map for three Georgia congressional districts violate the Constitution and weaken the power of voters of color. It challenges the 6th, 13th and 14th congressional districts. The Southern Poverty Law Center filed the lawsuit on behalf of Common Cause, the League of Women Voters of Georgia and individual voters.

This episode, combined with other information, is “more than enough to support (an) inference of nefarious intent” by Republican lawmakers, said lawyer Hilary Klein, a lawyer for Common Cause, another plaintiff. Strach likened the concept maps to “a shiny, irrelevant object” in the plaintiffs’ case.