Republicans cleared a significant hurdle Tuesday night in their drawing of new districts for the state's seats in Congress and the Legislature when the U.S. Department of Justice said it wouldn't oppose the maps approved in July on certain grounds of racial discrimination.
The decision by the lawyers in the department's Civil Rights Division to "preclear" all three maps -- for state House, Senate and the state's 13 U.S. House seats -- came only a few hours after legislative leaders disclosed omissions in the texts of the laws defining the boundaries that was caused by a computer code error.
Republican leaders at the General Assembly said the required fixes were technical in nature and didn't change the visual maps and other population data upon which legislators voted on the plans in July and were presented to the U.S. attorneys in September. A legislative fix was likely next week.
In a news release sent out Wednesday afternoon, NC NAACP President William Barber called the maps a "cleverly designed scheme to resegregate voters in North Carolina." He said his organization would be joined by the League of Women Voters, the A. Philip Randolph Institute, and Democracy, NC in filing a lawsuit Friday morning.
"We shall sue the leaders of the NC House and Senate, Thom Tillis and Phil Berger. They paid good taxpayer money to outside consultants to develop a scheme to resegregate minority voters and dilute our voting power," said Barber.
Republicans have said the new political boundaries are fair and praised the USDOJ decision Tuesday not to challenge them.
It "confirms what we've said all along: these are fair and legal maps that give a strong voice to all voters," Sen. Bob Rucho, R-Mecklenburg, and Rep. David Lewis, R-Harnett, said in a joint statement. "It also should silence the racially charged rhetoric and put to rest the baseless claim that these maps were somehow discriminatory."
Opponents of the maps point out the Justice Department doesn't review for all potential discrimination claims. They argue the boundaries weaken the overall influence of black voters by lumping them into certain districts, and the splitting of voting precincts appear to divide white and black voters only for GOP political gains.
"Make no mistake about it, this Republican redistricting plan will re-segregate North Carolina," state Democratic Party Chairman David Parker said in a release after the preclearance, adding that "the shapes of the resulting districts make a mockery of the redistricting process and the Republicans should be ashamed of themselves."
Earlier Tuesday, officials confirmed that the laws that identify census population units to mark district boundaries for the General Assembly and congressional seats failed to list more than 200 areas across the state.
The mistakes happened when computer-generated maps were translated into census block data that got inserted into the bills that explain in words the maps, according to a memo from legislative staff to redistricting leaders. The problems occurred largely with blocks of 2010 census data that got placed in voting units split between two or more districts, according to a memo from legislative staff to redistricting leaders.
Democrats jumped on the problem as proof GOP legislators in charge of the General Assembly for the first time in more than a century can't be trusted in drawing the maps, which would be used starting in 2012 through the rest of the decade.
"Their plan to split voting precincts proved too complicated even for their outside experts and sophisticated software to handle properly," said House Minority Leader Joe Hackney, D-Orange, in a statement.
Rucho called a comparable statement from Parker absurd and said if heard the explanations of the error, "he'd say, `Wow, some staff person simply screwed up."'
In a one-page letter to a state attorney handling the preclearance filing, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez said the U.S. Attorney General's Office did not "interpose any objection" to the maps. In a potential reference to the omissions, Perez wrote the "spatial and statistical data" provided Tuesday by the state "reflected the redistricting plans as intended to be adopted by the General Assembly."
The error, when combined with another redistricting law, affected 52 of the 120 House districts, 22 of the 50 Senate districts and two of the 13 congressional districts, the staff document said. It also created 20 legislative districts in which each district isn't entirely physically connected, which would run counter to the state constitution's requirement that they "at all times consist of contiguous territory."
The new GOP-penned maps would set the stage for the party to preserve or expand recent political gains in the Legislature and for Republicans to win potentially up to 10 of the state's 13 congressional districts. Democrats currently have a 7-6 edge within the delegation.
Classifieds | Report A Typo |
Send Tip |
Get Alerts | See Click Fix
Follow @abc11 on Twitter | Become a fan on Facebook
