The plan worked extremely well. In 2012, Republicans won just 49 percent of the statewide vote but snagged nine of 13 House seats. Two years later, with 54 percent of the vote, they won 10 of 13 seats. But a lawsuit against that plan argued that the Republican maps had actually been intended to dilute black votes, and a federal court struck the plan down in 2016. (The Supreme Court affirmed that decision last spring.)

Sent back to the drawing board—or, more precisely in this high-tech era, the drawing software—Republicans did not take a conciliatory stance. Instead, forbidden from using race, the GOP proudly used partisanship as their primary criterion in drawing new maps.

“I acknowledge freely that this would be a political gerrymander, which is not against the law,” said Representative David Lewis, the chair of the state House redistricting committee. He also said, “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.” And he suggested the committee draw maps that would produce 10 Republican and three Democratic U.S. House districts, on the basis that he didn’t think it would be possible to come up with an 11-2 map.

The court decision on Tuesday noted:

Legislative Defendants do not dispute that the General Assembly intended for the 2016 Plan to favor supporters of Republican candidates and disfavor supporters of non-Republican candidates. Nor could they … Legislative Defendants also do not argue—and have never argued—that the 2016 Plan’s intentional disfavoring of supporters of non-Republican candidates advances any democratic, constitutional, or public interest. Nor could they.

The decision to openly boast about a partisan plan was perhaps unwise, but it was not unfounded. No federal court had ever struck down a redistricting plan as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

Nonetheless, Common Cause and the League of Women Voters both challenged the law, and their two suits were consolidated into one. The plaintiffs argued that the plan violated the Equal Protection Clause, because it discriminated against non-Republican voters; the First Amendment, because it discriminated against voters based on previous political expression; and Article I, because it interfered with the right of the people to elect their representatives.

They brought novel statistical models to demonstrate how slanted the plan was. In particular, the plaintiffs focused on the “efficiency gap,” which measures how many votes for a candidate are wasted—either the number of votes in excess of what the candidate needs to win, common when voters backing a candidate are packed into a district, or the number of votes cast for the loser, when that candidate’s supporters are dispersed. Additionally, in a simulation of all possible North Carolina congressional maps, a Duke mathematician found that an 11-3 GOP split occurred just 0.7 percent of the time.</s>N.C. Gerrymandered Map Ruled Unconstitutional By Panel Of Judges

A three-judge panel ruled late Tuesday that North Carolina's congressional district map was illegally gerrymandered because of excessive partisanship that gave Republicans a solid advantage for most of the seats.

In a 191-page opinion, judges claimed that the map drawn by Republicans in North Carolina had been "motivated by invidious partisan intent" that would divide the state into 13 districts, of which 10 are Republican.

The federal judges have given state lawmakers until Jan. 29 to fix the issue and show them a new map.

The deadline is important because candidates for the November congressional elections begin filing for the primaries on Feb. 12.

The judges unanimously agreed that the state's lawmakers violated the equal-protection clause in the U.S. Constitution when the state's Republicans drew maps explicitly to favor their party.

The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., reports:

"The ruling comes in cases filed by the League of Women Voters and Common Cause in North Carolina stemming from maps adopted in 2016 during a special legislative session. It throws a new wrinkle and more uncertainty into the 2018 election cycle in North Carolina a month before candidates were scheduled to file for office.

"We're enormously gratified on behalf of our clients and all voters in North Carolina that no one will have to endure another congressional election under an unconstitutional map," said Allison Riggs, senior voting rights attorney for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which represented some of the challengers. "The court was clear in demanding a real remedy before the 2018 elections, and we expect the General Assembly to respect that order."

Democrats applauded the ruling.

North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Goodwin called the ruling a "major victory for North Carolina and people across the state whose voices were silenced by Republicans' unconstitutional attempts to rig the system to their partisan advantage."

Republicans, however, promise an appeal.

A spokeswoman for Republican state Sen. Ralph Hise, told the Raleigh newspaper that legislative leaders plan to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Hise and state Rep. David Lewis have led redistricting efforts in the legislature.

According to attorney Allison Riggs, the ruling is the first time federal judges have struck down congressional districts as partisan gerrymanders. A Wisconsin case that was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court involved state legislative districts found to be partisan gerrymanders.

NPR's Nina Totenberg reported on the Wisconsin test case before the Supreme Court:

In 2011 Wisconsin Republicans completely controlled the redistricting process for the first time in four decades. A divided federal court later found that Republicans, using high-speed computer technology along with new voter data, were able to draw new district lines to solidify their control of the Legislature for at least the rest of the decade, if not longer. Indeed, a year after the redistricting, Republicans captured only a minority of the statewide vote — 48.6 percent — but, as they had privately predicted, they still won 60 of the 99 state legislative seats, while the Democrats, who had won a majority of the vote, captured a mere 39 seats.

As the clock ticks down on the North Carolina court order, a majority of the judges agreed that if the legislature won't alter the map, they would hire a redistricting expert to draw replacement boundaries.</s>A federal court on Tuesday found North Carolina's congressional map to be an unconstitutional "partisan" gerrymander devised by the state's Republican lawmakers — and ordered the state to submit a new map by the end of the month.

The court gave the state until 5 p.m. Jan. 29 to submit a new map, but also began a process for appointing a special master who would draw a map if the state is unable to do so successfully.



The ruling comes as the Supreme Court is considering how partisan gerrymanders are considered by courts — in cases out of Wisconsin and Maryland — and it is expected that North Carolina lawmakers will ask to put the ruling on hold until the Wisconsin case, which was heard by the justices in October 2017, is resolved.



The possibility for delay, however, will soon run up against February filing deadlines for the North Carolina congressional races.

On Tuesday, the three-judge panel considering the case, in an opinion by Circuit Judge James Wynn, ruled that the North Carolina's map violated Equal Protection Clause, the First Amendment, and the Election Clause of Article I of the Constitution. Judge William Britt joined Wynn's opinion. Judge William Osteen Jr. wrote separately, but ultimately agreed that, under current Supreme Court case law, the state's plan was unconstitutional — although he did not agree that it violated the First Amendment.



Although the 205-page ruling went into great detail about the plan, the claims, and the law, the underlying facts were blunt: After the original redistricting plan was struck down as a racial gerrymander, lawmakers asked the person they had re-drawing the map "to remedy the racial gerrymander and "to use political data ... in drawing the remedial plan."

Rep. David Lewis — the senior chair of the state House's redistricting committee — "acknowledge[d] freely that this would be a political gerrymander," which he claimed was "not against the law," the court noted.

In considering the Equal Protection claim, the court reviewed expert testimony in the case at length to consider the claim. One expert for the plaintiffs computer generated 1,000 maps using "the non-partisan criteria included in the Committee’s Adopted Criteria: population equality, contiguity, minimizing county and VTD splits, and maximizing compactness."

The expert "found that none of the 1,000 plans yielded a congressional delegation of 10 Republicans and 3 Democrats — the outcome that would have occurred under the 2016 Plan — when he evaluated the sample." (The expert, Dr. Jowei Chen, went on to consider two other 1,000-map simulations to control for different situations — with the same result that none had as partisan a result as the actual map passed by the state.)

The court concluded that "the General Assembly intended to discriminate against voters who supported or were likely to support non-Republican candidates" and that "the 2016 Plan dilutes the votes of non-Republican voters and entrenches Republican control of the state’s congressional delegation."

In ruling the map unconstitutional under the First Amendment, the court looked to several areas of First Amendment law — including viewpoint discrimination ("prohibit[ing] the government from favoring or disfavoring particular viewpoints"), electoral speech dilution (addressing "the First Amendment’s prohibition on laws that disfavor a particular group or class of speakers"), retaliation ("prohibiti[ng] ... burdening or penalizing individuals for engaging in protected speech"), and election regulations (having "the potential to burden political speech or association").

"Against these many, multifaceted lines of precedent, the First Amendment’s applicability to partisan gerrymandering is manifest," Wynn wrote, before concluding the North Carolina plan violated the amendment.

The court also found that the plan violated provisions of Article I of the Constitution — clauses detailing that the "House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen . . . by the People" and the Elections Clause, which states that state legislatures have the authority to set the "times, places and manner of holding elections," subject to congressional alterations.

The court found the plan "exceeds the General Assembly’s delegated authority under the Elections Clause" because, in part, it "represents an impermissible effort to 'dictate electoral outcomes' and 'disfavor a class of candidates.'"

"[T]he 2016 Plan’s demonstrated partisan favoritism," the court concluded, "simply is not authorized by the Elections Clause."</s>DURHAM, N.C.—Federal judges have yet again struck down North Carolina’s congressional districts as an unconstitutional gerrymander, dealing Republicans a blow and throwing the state’s maps into chaos just months before a pivotal midterm election. A three-judge panel, including one circuit-court judge and two district-court judges, ruled Tuesday evening that the Old North State’s redistricting plan relied too heavily on partisan affiliation in drawing constituencies, violating citizens’ rights under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, the First Amendment, and Article I of the Constitution. The decision is the first time a federal court has ever struck down a redistricting plan as a partisan gerrymander. The final word, however, will likely come from the Supreme Court, which is considering two partisan-gerrymandering cases. When Republicans took over the North Carolina General Assembly in 2011, for the first time since 1870, they had the opportunity to redraw districts following the 2010 Census, and quickly set to drawing maps that would aid GOP candidates. In doing so, they relied in part on racial data—a practice that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled permissible when creating majority-minority districts. In North Carolina, as in many southern states, there is a strong correlation between African Americans and Democratic voters, and this effectively helped Republicans crowd Democratic voters into fewer districts. The plan worked extremely well. In 2012, Republicans won just 49 percent of the statewide vote but snagged nine of 13 House seats. Two years later, with 54 percent of the vote, they won 10 of 13 seats. But a lawsuit against that plan argued that the Republican maps had actually been intended to dilute black votes, and a federal court struck the plan down in 2016. (The Supreme Court affirmed that decision last spring.)

Sent back to the drawing board—or, more precisely in this high-tech era, the drawing software—Republicans did not take a conciliatory stance. Instead, forbidden from using race, the GOP proudly used partisanship as their primary criterion in drawing new maps. “I acknowledge freely that this would be a political gerrymander, which is not against the law,” said Representative David Lewis, the chair of the state House redistricting committee. He also said, “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.” And he suggested the committee draw maps that would produce 10 Republican and three Democratic U.S. House districts, on the basis that he didn’t think it would be possible to come up with an 11-2 map. Legislative Defendants do not dispute that the General Assembly intended for the 2016 Plan to favor supporters of Republican candidates and disfavor supporters of non-Republican candidates. Nor could they … Legislative Defendants also do not argue—and have never argued—that the 2016 Plan’s intentional disfavoring of supporters of non-Republican candidates advances any democratic, constitutional, or public interest. Nor could they. The decision to openly boast about a partisan plan was perhaps unwise, but it was not unfounded. No federal court had ever struck down a redistricting plan as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

Nonetheless, Common Cause and the League of Women Voters both challenged the law, and their two suits were consolidated into one. The plaintiffs argued that the plan violated the Equal Protection Clause, because it discriminated against non-Republican voters; the First Amendment, because it discriminated against voters based on previous political expression; and Article I, because it interfered with the right of the people to elect their representatives. They brought novel statistical models to demonstrate how slanted the plan was. In particular, the plaintiffs focused on the “efficiency gap,” which measures how many votes for a candidate are wasted—either the number of votes in excess of what the candidate needs to win, common when voters backing a candidate are packed into a district, or the number of votes cast for the loser, when that candidate’s supporters are dispersed. Additionally, in a simulation of all possible North Carolina congressional maps, a Duke mathematician found that an 11-3 GOP split occurred just 0.7 percent of the time. The legislature argued against the suit, protesting that the statistical models were dubious and not constitutionally sanctioned, and protesting that they being required to answer a koan-like question: “How much politics is too much politics in redistricting?” The judges were having none of it. “A partisan gerrymander that is intended to and likely has the effect of entrenching a political party in power undermines the ability of voters to effect change when they see legislative action as infringing on their rights,” Judge James Wynn, an Obama appointee, wrote for the court. “We agree with Plaintiffs that a wealth of evidence proves the General Assembly’s intent to ‘subordinate’ the interests of non-Republican voters and ‘entrench’ Republican domination of the state’s congressional delegation.”

Wynn was joined in full by Judge William Britt, a Carter appointee, and in part by Judge William Osteen Jr., a George W. Bush appointee who accepted the Equal Protection and Article I arguments but rejected the plaintiffs’ First Amendment claim. Wynn slapped aside the General Assembly’s arguments against the statistical models, saying that the absence of a constitutional reference to such models did not mean the court could not consider them as evidence: Legislative Defendants’ judicial manageability argument appears to rest on a more cynical objection: that we should dismiss Plaintiffs’ actions as nonjusticiable simply because much of the evidence upon which Plaintiffs’ rely has its genesis in academic research and is the product of an effort by scholars to apply novel, and sometimes complex, methodological approaches to address a previously intractable problem. To the extent Legislative Defendants are in fact making such an argument, it fails as a matter of both fact and law. Courts have long been wary of striking down partisan gerrymanders both because of the difficulty of deciding what is permitted in partisan gamesmanship and what goes too far, and out of fear of taking the side of one party or the other. The statistical models employed in this case are part of a new push by voting-rights advocates to quantify partisan gerrymandering, and they inspired spirited debate among the justices when the Supreme Court heard arguments about redistricting in October. Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College, argued the North Carolina decision was written specifically to appeal to Justice Anthony Kennedy, the likely swing vote on the high Court’s partisan-gerrymandering cases.

Democrats rushed to applaud the decision. Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who is leading a national Democratic redistricting initiative, said, “Today’s ruling was just the latest example of the courts telling state legislators in North Carolina that citizens should be able to pick their representatives, instead of politicians picking their voters.” North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Wayne Goodwin said, “It's time the General Assembly put partisanship aside and draw fair, non-partisan maps that give North Carolina voters a voice.” But the North Carolina GOP’s executive director, Dallas Woodhouse, responded angrily. “It is incredibly disappointing that activist Federal Judge Jim Wynn is waging a personal, partisan war on North Carolina Republican voters,” Woodhouse said. “This is a hostile takeover of the #NCGA and legislative bodies across the U.S.” Just how much the ruling helps Democrats—who are already hopeful that 2018 will be a wave election that hands them control of the U.S. House—remains to be seen. The election-law expert Rick Hasen noted that the Supreme Court will likely stay the decision. Even if it did not, the ultimate maps are not yet drawn. The judges granted the General Assembly another chance to draw maps, but gave them only until January 29 to propose a plan to the court—there’s urgency to get a map in place ahead of the midterm election. However, the court also announced it would appoint a special master, an outside expert, to draw a plan in the event the legislature’s plan doesn’t pass muster. Since Republicans took control of the General Assembly, they have pursued a sweeping program of conservative policies, which has often brought them into conflict with federal courts. The legislature passed a set of voting laws, including reductions in early voting and a requirement to show photo ID to vote, but that law was largely struck down by a federal court in 2016. In June 2017, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower-court ruling striking down state-legislative districts as gerrymandered. After judges rejected a remedy, they appointed a special master who recently proposed new lines. Over the years, the Old North State has been home to several notable federal-court decisions on redistricting, and on Tuesday, Common Cause v. Rucho joined that select company.</s>Federal judges ruled Tuesday that North Carolina’s congressional district map drawn by legislative Republicans is illegally gerrymandered because of excessive partisanship that gave the GOP a rock-solid advantage for most seats.

The ruling marks the second time this decade that the GOP’s congressional boundaries in the state have been thrown out by a three-judge panel. In 2016, another panel tossed out two majority black congressional districts initially drawn in 2011, saying there was no justification for using race as the predominant factor in forming them. The redrawn map was the basis for a new round of lawsuits.

The latest lawsuit – filed by election advocacy groups and Democrats – said the replacement for the racial gerrymander also contained unlawful partisan gerrymanders. Those who sued argued that Republican legislators went too far when they followed criteria designed to retain the party’s 10-3 majority in the state delegation.

Tuesday’s ruling marks the first time a congressional plan was struck down on partisan gerrymandering claims, according to Allison Riggs, an attorney representing the League of Women Voters of North Carolina and other plaintiffs.

All three judges agreed the “invidious partisanship” in the plan violated the constitution’s equal protection provision and direction to the state to hold congressional elections because it took the power to elect their representatives away from the people.

“We find that the general assembly drew and enacted the 2016 plan with intent to subordinate the interests of non-Republican voters and entrench Republican control of North Carolina’s congressional delegation,” US circuit court judge Jim Wynn wrote in the majority opinion. Wynn added that the evidence shows the “plan achieved the general assembly’s discriminatory partisan objective.”

The judges ordered the general assembly to approve another set of districts by 24 January. Candidate filing for the November congressional elections begins 12 February, with primaries set for early May. A majority of the judges also agreed the panel would hire a redistricting expert to draw replacement boundaries if the legislature won’t.

Through a spokeswoman, Senate Redistricting Committee chairman Ralph Hise of Mitchell County said lawmakers plan to appeal.

The districts “are fair and were drawn following all known rules, and existing case law,” state Republican party executive director Dallas Woodhouse said in a news release.

But Bob Phillips with Common Cause, which with other voters filed a lawsuit tried with the League of Women Voters’ case, said “politicians will no longer be allowed to use partisan gerrymandering in order to shield themselves from accountability to the public” if the ruling stands.</s>WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (Reuters) - A three-judge federal panel ordered congressional districts in North Carolina to be redrawn ahead of the 2018 elections, ruling on Tuesday that the Republican-drawn map was illegal and unconstitutionally partisan.

The ruling was the first time that a federal court blocked a congressional map because of partisan gerrymandering, said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.

The judges in a 191-page ruling said the state legislator responsible for the 2016 map had said he drew it to give Republican candidates an advantage.

“But that is not a choice the Constitution allows legislative map drawers to make,” the court said.

The panel gave the state until Jan. 29 to file a proposed remedial plan with the court. Congressional elections are scheduled for November across the United States.

Ralph Hise, North Carolina’s state Senate Redistricting Chairman, said through a spokeswoman that lawmakers would appeal.

Dallas Woodhouse, the state’s Republican Party Executive Director, said in a statement that the ruling usurped legislative authority and amounted to “partisan war on North Carolina Republican voters.”

Democrats and the groups that brought the lawsuit applauded.

“Today’s ruling is a major victory for North Carolina and people across the state whose voices were silenced by Republicans’ unconstitutional attempts to rig the system to their partisan advantage,” North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Goodwin said in a statement.

NYU’s Li said that if the North Carolina case is upheld upon appeal it would have far-reaching implications.

“The courts will have signaled that there are, in fact, limits of how far you can go with partisan gerrymandering,” Li said.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule later this year on Wisconsin’s appeal of a lower court ruling that state Republican lawmakers created unconstitutional state legislative districts with the partisan aim of hobbling Democrats in legislative races.

The Supreme Court has been willing to invalidate state electoral maps on the grounds of racial discrimination, as it did last May when it found that Republican legislators in North Carolina had drawn two electoral districts to diminish the statewide political clout of black voters. But the justices have not thrown out state electoral maps drawn simply to give one party an advantage over another.

Republicans in North Carolina could decide to seek a stay of the ruling until the Supreme Court decides the Wisconsin case, said Virginia Tech political scientist Nicholas Goedert.</s>RALEIGH, N.C. -- Federal judges ruled Tuesday that North Carolina's congressional district map drawn by legislative Republicans is illegally gerrymandered because of excessive partisanship that gave the GOP a rock-solid advantage for most seats and must quickly be redone.

The ruling marks the second time this decade that the GOP's congressional boundaries in the state have been thrown out by a three-judge panel. In 2016, another panel tossed out two majority black congressional districts initially drawn in 2011, saying there was no justification for using race as the predominant factor in forming them. The redrawn map was the basis for a new round of lawsuits.

The latest lawsuit -- filed by election advocacy groups and Democrats -- said the replacement for the racial gerrymander also contained unlawful partisan gerrymanders. Those who sued argued that Republican legislators went too far when they followed criteria designed to retain the party's 10-3 majority in the state delegation.

Tuesday's ruling marks the first time a congressional plan was struck down on partisan gerrymandering claims, according to Allison Riggs, an attorney representing the League of Women Voters of North Carolina and other plaintiffs.

All three judges agreed the "invidious partisanship" in the plan violated the Constitution's equal protection provision and direction to the state to hold congressional elections because it took the power to elect their representatives away from the people.

"We find that the General Assembly drew and enacted the 2016 plan with intent to subordinate the interests of non-Republican voters and entrench Republican control of North Carolina's congressional delegation," U.S. Circuit Court Judge Jim Wynn wrote in the majority opinion. Wynn added that the evidence shows the "plan achieved the General Assembly's discriminatory partisan objective."

The judges ordered the General Assembly to approve another set of districts by Jan. 24. Candidate filing for the November congressional elections begins Feb. 12, with primaries set for early May. A majority of the judges also agreed the panel would hire a redistricting expert to draw replacement boundaries if the legislature won't.

Through a spokeswoman, Senate Redistricting Committee Chairman Ralph Hise of Mitchell County said lawmakers plan to appeal. There's a good chance Republicans will try to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to block the ruling's enforcement until the justices rule in a similar case from Wisconsin that they heard in the fall. That case involves legislative districts.

The districts "are fair and were drawn following all known rules, and existing case law," state Republican Party Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse said in a news release.

But Bob Phillips with Common Cause, which with other voters filed a lawsuit tried with the League of Women Voters' case, said "politicians will no longer be allowed to use partisan gerrymandering in order to shield themselves from accountability to the public" if the ruling stands.

At the time of the 2016 debate, according to the order, House redistricting chief Rep. David Lewis attempted to justify the criteria by saying "I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country."

Wynn and U.S. District Judge Earl Britt agreed that the map also violated the First Amendment rights of Democrats in each district where their favored candidate had little chance to win, burdening their freedom of speech and of association. In a separate opinion, District Judge William Osteen wrote that those who sued had failed to prove those rights had been violated.

During a trial in October in Greensboro, attorneys for Republican mapmakers argued that the plaintiffs had blown the partisanship factor out of proportion, saying aspects like incumbent protection and district compactness were considered. But Wynn, in his 191-page opinion, gave lots of credence to the number-crunching of math and political science experts who testified that the only explanation for the 2016 map was partisanship.

Wynn is on a separate three-judge panel weighing whether to accept changes to two dozen state House and Senate districts completed by a special master. Lawmakers redrew legislative maps last August after boundaries originally drawn in 2011 were struck down as racial gerrymanders, but the judges were worried unconstitutional lines remain.

Woodhouse focused his critique on Wynn, a former North Carolina state judge nominated to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by President Barack Obama. Wynn, according to Woodhouse is "waging a personal, partisan war on North Carolina Republican voters." Osteen was nominated by President George W. Bush while President Jimmy Carter chose Britt.</s>WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (Reuters) - A three-judge federal panel ordered congressional districts in North Carolina to be redrawn ahead of the 2018 elections, ruling on Tuesday that the current Republican-drawn map was illegal and unconstitutionally partisan.

The judges said the state legislator responsible for the 2016 map had said he drew it to give Republican candidates an advantage.

“But that is not a choice the Constitution allows legislative map drawers to make,” the court said.

Ralph Hise, North Carolina’s state Senate Redistricting Chairman, said through a spokeswoman that lawmakers would appeal.

Democrats and the groups that brought the suit applauded the ruling.

“Today’s ruling is a major victory for North Carolina and people across the state whose voices were silenced by Republicans’ unconstitutional attempts to rig the system to their partisan advantage,” North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Goodwin said in a statement.

While prior court decisions had ruled against unconstitutional racial gerrymandering in North Carolina, Common Cause - one of the public-interest groups that filed the lawsuit - said the ruling marked the first time a court had struck down partisan gerrymandering in the state.

The U.S. Supreme Court last June upheld a lower court’s ruling that Republican lawmakers in North Carolina had mapped state legislative districts in a way that diluted the clout of black voters.

The judges gave the state until Jan. 29 to file a proposed remedial plan with the court.</s>GREENSBORO, N.C. — North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein announced Tuesday a federal three-judge panel for North Carolina’s Middle District has struck down North Carolina’s 2016 congressional plan as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

The 2016 plan was developed after a federal court invalidated two congressional districts as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.

BREAKING: The three judge panel in the NC Congressional partisan gerrymandering case (Common Cause/LWV v. Rucho) just issued a ruling unanimously concluding that the congressional maps constitute an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.</s>A panel of federal judges on Tuesday declared North Carolina’s congressional map an “unconstitutional gerrymander,” giving lawmakers just two weeks to map new districts.

Judges appointed by former presidents Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush and Barack Obama unanimously condemned Republican legislators’ violation of the U.S. Constitution’s equal-protection clause.

“On its most fundamental level, partisan gerrymandering violates ‘the core principle of republican government… that the voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around,’” stated the majority opinion.

If a new map is not put in place by January 24, a special expert will be assigned to draw the districts.

But Republicans plan to fight the ruling, according to the Raleigh News & Observer. A spokesperson told the newspaper that legislative leaders will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although North Carolina’s electorate leans roughly 50-50 toward Republican and Democratic candidates, redistricting efforts have given Republicans a significant advantage by exploiting flaws in the electoral system.

State Rep. David Lewis, a lawmaker involved in the GOP’s gerrymandering effort, proposed in 2016 to “draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”

Although the federal ruling is a win for Democrats, many Republicans have broken with their party over gerrymandering.

Last September, a group of past and present GOP lawmakers—including Arizona Senator John McCain, Ohio Governor John Kasich and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger—filed briefs urging the Supreme Court to rule that extreme gerrymandering violates the Constitution.

The Supreme Court is expected to issue a definitive ruling on gerrymandering this June during the Gill v. Witford case—where Democratic citizens from Wisconsin are suing Republican legislators over redistricting efforts.
A three-judge federal panel rules North Carolina's congressional district map was illegally gerrymandered because legislators relied too heavily on partisan affiliation in drawing constituencies. This is the first time a federal court has struck down a redistricting plan for partisan gerrymandering.