Voting rights groups are praising last week’s United States Supreme Court ruling, rejecting a bid by North Carolina Republican lawmakers to give state legislatures sweeping authority in drawing congressional maps and regulating federal elections. Meanwhile, those same lawmakers have been busy pushing through new state election legislation.
Freelance reporter Jordan Wilke covers elections and democracy and has been following the story. BPR’s Helen Chickering talked with Wilke about his recently published article in The Guardian.
HC: Jordan, let's start with the Supreme Court ruling. There are actually two being hailed by voting rights groups, the most recent here inNorth Carolina, and then an earlier one inAlabama striking down that state's congressional maps - both being hailed as wins. Help us understand what was won.
JW: Really what was won was preservation of the system of checks and balances at the state level that we already have in the case out of North Carolina. What was won in the Alabama case, was again a preservation of the protections that people currently have. These victories don't add anything new in terms of protections or guarantees to access the right to vote for folks anywhere in the country. What they did is they preserved the precedent.
HC: Let's do a brief unpack of the North Carolina case, which centers around this so-called Independent State Legislature Theory. It's a case brought by state Republican lawmakers who basically said they should be free to draw congressional maps pretty much any way they want. Tell us a bit about the case and what it means for the lawmakers who lost.
JW: So this theory was a first brought up in a concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore, after the disputed 2000 presidential election. It sort of went by the wayside for quite some time, until 2020 when it saw a really big resurgence due to a whole host of factors that came to play at the same time. Most pressing was the executive and court responses to all the different challenges they faced during COVID in order to have emergency access to the vote - and that created a lot of conflicts often between conservatively controlled legislatures and liberally controlled courts and executive branches.
And that's exactly what happened in North Carolina. So this theory that was by the wayside was then picked back up in 2020, in a number of different ways, including the theory sort of backed the attempt post-election of several states to try to challenge the results of the election and prevent now President Joe Biden from being put in into office. And that theory was again, brought up in North Carolina in 2022 in regard to this, challenge over whether or not we can have partisan gerrymandering under the state constitution. And so there are various iterations of this theory. All of them would've been relatively extreme as our current system works, and has always worked. When the federal government sets rules for elections, that has to be applied to all federal elections across all states. But there's a whole lot of extra wiggle room for states to set their own rules about how to run federal elections.
So in order to fill in all those gaps, states come in their state legislatures set laws for how to run federal elections and for all of sort of American history, what we've seen is that those state laws about federal elections, at the state level - have always been held in check by gubernatorial vetoes or by state courts that can say, you know, this is unconstitutional under our state constitution. And so, this theory would've basically blown away those checks and balances in its most extreme form and would've really given state legislatures total leeway over how to write federal election law at the state level. A lot of experts were really worried that would've created, a race to the bottom among democratically controlled and Republican controlled state legislatures to totally just favor themselves. But - because that case failed at the US Supreme Court, nothing changes and so it's being hailed as a win. But really that excitement over the win is just a really big sigh of relief because it could have caused a whole lot of chaos.
HC: The case out of Alabama also also focuses on maps. How will that ruling be relevant to North Carolina?
JW: North Carolina is going to engage in redistricting for a US house seat for the US Congress, and it's going to engage in redistricting for state level seats. So as part of this state level litigation in the other case there were all these questions around whether or not North Carolina's constitution would allow for partisan gerrymandering. A democratically controlled state Supreme Court said it's not allowed. Then the election came, Republicans were elected to the court, so they then had control of the court. They reheard the case in a really unusual move and then reversed their decision. And so, because they reversed their decision, partisan gerrymandering is now allowed in North Carolina under the state constitution, and therefore the legislature gets to redraw all those maps that the court intervened previously and told them they couldn't use.
So, what did the Alabama case tell us? Again, it's one of these things where the argument in front of the Supreme Court said, "we have this current set of rules, we would like to change it." And the Supreme Court turned said, "no, we're not overturning precedent." So the ruling did protected something underSection 2 of the Voting Rights Act that said you cannot dilute the vote for minority groups. Under a vote dilution, you could take all of the black people in North Carolina and shove them into very few voting districts, so they have a lot of power over very few seats. The other thing you can do is you could take other sections of the black population and spread them out really thinly across a bunch of districts, so they have very little power over all of those districts. Using those two strategies together, you could ultimately reduce the voting power of the black population in North Carolina significantly less than their proportional weight of the population. So, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act says - that's not allowed.
So as North Carolina lawmakers try to draw maps this fall, they're likely to try to replicate the maps that they drew in 2021, and there was a big question over whether or not those maps were racially discriminatory. And so now expect to hear a lot of conversation at the legislative level and especially if they pass maps at possible litigation afterward, talking about whether or not the rights of minority groups in North Carolina are diluted in terms of casting their votes.
HC: You just mentioned conversation and activity underway in the legislature - now that Republicans are in control.
JW: The North Carolina legislature has a Republican super majority, and they have control over the state Supreme Court. And so that means they still get to basically do whatever they want up front. Voting rights groups will ultimately try to challenge that in the backend, if they don't like these bills. And so, the North Carolina legislature's doing two things, first, they're trying to pass a number of bills that would change the way elections are run in North Carolina, and then they're going to try to do redistricting. Senator Ralph Hise, whose district includes several counties in WNC, is one of the chair members of the Senate Elections and Redistricting Committee, has been a primary sponsor or co-sponsor on two bills that would change the way that we do elections going forward. The same groups that sued in North Carolina over their partisan maps in 2021 - 2022 are also opposed to these two bills.
HC: What is the next chapter in this story that you'll be covering?
JW: I'm watching how closely are these groups that advocated for overturning our democracy in 2020 pushing for bills that will help them try to do the same in future elections. What is the motivation for passing some of these bills? Is it really a way to clean up and make elections more efficient? Or is it really a type of power grab by controlling the mechanism of elections?
HC: Jordan, thank you so much for taking the time.
JW: I really appreciate it.
