[Official comments from Jay DeLancy, Founder of Voter Integrity Project – NC, North Carolina’s oldest constitutional election watchdog group.]
Sept 13, 2019 (Raleigh) — For years, Voter Integrity Project has stayed out of the redistricting fight, dismissing it as a “partisan” matter. We have always viewed the VIP mission as that of a non-partisan election watchdog group and we still do.
We speak out today because the so-called “Progressive” Left is trying to gerrymander the districts to their advantage through a judicial tyranny that subverts our state Constitution.
Less than a month after the Supreme Court of the US ruled that the Judicial Branch has no standing in battles over redistricting, the Left found the loophole and rolled in with massive out-of-state funding and their usual arsenal of lawyers. In his ruling, Chief Justice Roberts betrayed Section 4, Article 4 of the US Constitution when he only addressed the “Federal” courts and sabotaged the process for the individual states. This was an impeachable disservice to our form of government.
Obeying the ACLU’s recent court victory over NC n this matter, the Legislature created one thousand district maps with non-partisan criteria and selected the winning map through a random drawing.
Not content with the nonpartisan process, the ACLU-funded politicians and activists demanded a public hearing on the matter and the Legislature agreed to hold hearings Monday at noon. If this process concerns you, we urge you to sign up (by clicking here). If all speaker slots are already taken by the time you read this, they allow written comments (post your House comments by clicking here and Senate comments here). But before you sign up, please read the Pro Publica article linked below.
If Democrats and the ACLU find fault with the way our Legislature obeyed the recent court order, they will expose their true motives in this entire Kabuki Theater, which is to follow the California Blueprint and without winning elections, they will gerrymander North Carolina through judicial subversion to make us into the next taxpayer-enslavement zone.
Now, our questions . . .
To the Democrats . . . why don’t you grow up, take your new districts, and go work on crafting better policies? Why don’t you admit that you’d rather avoid the voters and steal back your majority through judicial gerrymandering? Blaming the new districts for your unpopularity isn’t a good look. Besides, since the Republicans won their majority through your heavily gerrymandered maps that your party drew for 100+ years, why embarrass yourselves by blaming the process?
To the Republicans . . . Thank you for getting this job done fast enough that the courts cannot step in gerrymander the state into a California-style Democratic supermajority. While the SCOTUS just ruled that federal courts have no business in redistricting cases, isn’t there anything you can do to stop the state courts from their continued unconstitutional power grab?
~ jd
