Research Blows Up the Myth of “Nonpartisan” redistricting.

Nov 8, 2019 (Raleigh) Voter Integrity Project has always steered clear of the fight over redistricting because we trust the self-serving political parties to hold each other in check.

That all changed when a significant number of Republican lawmakers joined forces with enough Democrat lawmakers to craft HB 140, a bill that would cave to the Eric Holder-Barak Obama strategy of hijacking the redistricting authority that’s expressly given to the Legislative branch of government in both the NC and US constitutions.

We’ve already linked to George Will’s stern lecture on the subject and to the All on the Line website that explains the Left’s ground-game strategy. We’ve also linked to an expose on the “sue ’till they’re blue” strategy of the Left and to a ProPublica expose that looks back at how the Democrats hijacked California’s so-called “non-partisan” redistricting commission after they fooled the voters into supporting a constitutional amendment on the question.

Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You

We now offer two reports on how the claims of “non-partisan” redistricting do not work, so matter how flowery the speeches may be. The first report, written by Hans von Spakovsky and Michael Watson, is actually the Cliff Note version of the second, a Congressional Research Center study (written by Watson) that proves the fallacy and failings of non-partisan redistricting commissions.

Next, we reached out to Hans von Spakvosky and to the legal team of former DOJ attorney, J. Christian Adams to help us devise an alternative to HB140. We suggest a constitutional amendment that would somehow limit the continuous lawfare the Left has used against North Carolina. If done properly, it could be used elsewhere… but no consensus has been reached.

The overall gist is that just as elections have a statutory period in which they are easily contested, once they are certified, the barrier to overturn the outcome is much higher.

Redistricting is even more partisan than is the outcome of any single election, so some sort of statutory (or constitutional) limit should be placed on those using lawfare to change the boundaries.

Suggestions are welcome on how to create an equitable limit in this area of the law.

We could recount the saga of how North Carolina’s GOP-led legislature has been sued pretty much from the day the maps were drawn after their unlikely 2010 victories. But for now, we will pass on such a long rant and let others spin the story.

The bottom line is that elections have consequences and at some point, the courts cannot be used to rewrite the results. Rather than deflect the lawfare attacks away from the Legislature and against a so-called “non-partisan” redistricting commission (as HB 140 does), we suggest they scrap HB 140 and devise a more responsible approach.

~ jd