Fair voting districts
Published November 9, 2017
Editorial by Winston-Salem Journal, November 8, 2017.
A federal court panel will rightly go ahead with plans to hire an outside expert to redraw several districts that it had ruled were tainted by racial basis.
This is entirely appropriate. At this point, the only better outcome would be an independent redistricting commission.
An order from the panel of three federal judges appointed Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford University law professor, to redo two Senate and seven House districts that the judges previously ruled were among 28 districts tainted by racial bias, The Associated Press reported. He has until Dec. 1, and the judges plan to review his work in January, according to the AP.
A lawyer for Republican legislative leaders had called the move premature and questioned the professor’s impartiality.
“The state is not entitled to multiple opportunities to remedy its unconstitutional districts,” the court replied, adding that the legislators’ objections to Persily “are speculative and insubstantial.”
Allison Riggs, a lawyer who successfully sued for voters over the 2011 maps, liked the panel’s order. “We think it’s certainly helpful to have a special master at this stage,” she told the AP, adding that it “keeps all doors open to having finally constitutional districts for our 2018 elections.”
Amy Auth, a spokeswoman for chairmen of the House and Senate redistricting committees, responded that the court has quickly seized the constitutional and sovereign right to draw districts from lawmakers to an “unelected California college professor with clear conflicts of interest.”
We disagree.
And we repeat our call for an independent commission to draw voting districts.
Republicans wanted that when they were in the minority.
The districts the Republicans drew in 2011 weren’t the first unfairly drawn ones. Democrats drew some unfair ones when they were in charge, and it was just as wrong then.
But we hope this will at least be the beginning of the end.
North Carolina voters have the right to choose their legislators rather than have their legislators choose their voters, as the wise saying goes.
