Federal District Court Rejects North Carolina Redistricting Challenge Seeking to Require Race-Based Districts
By: Drew C. Marvel, Michael Bayes, and Jason Torchinsky
On September 30, a federal district court upheld North Carolina’s state Senate redistricting plan under the Voting Rights Act (VRA), rejecting a Section 2 challenge brought by two North Carolina voters who argued the map diluted black voters’ voting strength. The case is Pierce v. North Carolina State Board of Elections.
The plaintiffs argued the state legislature “violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act … by not engaging in race-based districting and not creating a majority-black Senate district in northeast North Carolina.” The court noted that “the record demonstrates that when the General Assembly drew the maps and created all the districts … in October 2023 for use in the 2024 elections, the General Assembly did not have racial data in the computer.” Plaintiffs alleged the new map, drawn without racial data, diluted Black voters’ voting strength and Section 2 of the VRA required a majority-Black Senate district be drawn in the northeast region of the state.
The district court concluded the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate a Section 2 violation, stating it would not “use Section 2 to direct the General Assembly to engage in the odious practice of sorting voters by race.” The court determined that the record showed that “communities in northeast North Carolina,” and “communities throughout North Carolina,” are “communities in which minority citizens are able to form coalitions with voters from other racial and ethnic groups, having no need to be a majority within a single district in order to elect candidates of their choice.”
The court’s opinion discussed numerous shortcomings with the plaintiffs’ case. The court discounted the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses and analyses as not credible and rejected evidence of historical discrimination in the state as not relevant to current circumstances. The court also noted the results of North Carolina’s 2024 election and the success of minority candidates recently elected under the challenged plan.
Most fatal issue to the plaintiffs’ case, however, was the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2017 decision in Cooper v. Harris which found that racially polarized voting did not exist in North Carolina. Racially polarized voting is an essential element to establish a Section 2 “vote dilution” violation under Thornburg v. Gingles, and without that element, the courts cannot require the drawing of a majority-minority district. In Gingles, the Supreme Court established a framework for determining when a majority-minority district is required to be drawn under Section 2 of the VRA, and that framework has been the subject of nearly constant litigation ever since.
The district court’s decision previews the focus of upcoming arguments in the Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais. The Court heard Callais last term but, after failing to produce a decision, ordered the case be reargued so that it could further consider whether the Court’s nearly 40-year project of requiring specially drawn majority-minority districts under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is consistent with the U.S. Constitution. The Justices will hear the case on October 15 with the central question being whether Louisiana’s intentional creation of a majority-minority congressional district to satisfy a district court’s demands under Section 2 of the VRA violates the 14th and 15th Amendments.
* Holtzman Vogel represented the state at the trial court in Callais, and filed an amicus brief for Governor Landry at the Supreme Court in the Callais matter.
