Groups unite for redistricting reform

Rouzer lost to McIntyre by 654 votes – a razor-thin 0.2 percent margin – of the more than 336,000 cast. But across the state, most other general election races were a sweep. For example, North Carolina's other three Democratic representatives won their races by an average 53 points; the state's nine Republican Congress members claimed their seats by an average 15 points.

That lack of true competition has an unlikely group of policy organizations – that lean to the left and right – joining forces to advocate for a fairer way of drawing legislative and congressional district lines in the decennial redistricting process.

“Ending Gerrymandering Now” is a project of The N.C. Coalition for Lobbying and Government Reform. With legislative efforts stalling this session, the organization has taken its show on the road to drum up support for new restrictions on how district lines are drawn. For its fourth event, organizers will be in Wilmington at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Pearsall Memorial Presbyterian Church, 3902 Market St.

“It's a broken process in North Carolina,” said Bob Phillips, director of Common Cause North Carolina, a good-government advocacy group. “It (the current system) is one that draws lines to benefit the political party in power. Both parties are guilty of that.”

The result, says Phillips, is that the real battles are now fought largely in primaries – where candidates often battle to the far right or left – leading to the election of fringe candidates from both parties. This results in a deep ideological divide between elected representatives that produces stalemates like the one that recently shut down the federal government, he said.

The redistricting reform campaign brings together unlikely bedfellows, such as the League of Women Voters and N.C. Policy Watch on the left and the John Locke Foundation and N.C. Family Policy Council on the right.

They are united around a common goal: The state must change how it does redistricting.

“It doesn't make sense for the politicians themselves to draw the maps of who's going to be voting for them,” said Mitch Kokai, spokesman and policy analyst for the conservative John Locke Foundation.

“The main reason we're interested in this is we're focusing on limited constitutional government. … You can't have a government that meets that standard if you are unclear about the way that people are placed into office,” Kokai said.

In other words, he said, the public should be selecting their elected representatives, not the other way around. His group is advocating for a third-party organization, not politicians, to draw lines abiding by a set of rules. Examples include ensuring districts are compact, not taking into account where incumbents live and not using party registration of residents as part of the equation.

Currently, after every decennial U.S. Census count, the General Assembly redraws legislative and congressional district maps to account for population shifts in accordance with the law. But in drawing the lines, politicians also consider such things as the party affiliation of the electorate – packing Republican or Democratic voters into a district, for example – and where the incumbent resides.

The results can be maps that look like someone simply sneezed and drew a line around the residue.

Phillips said the coalition is advocating for a redistricting process modeled after the way it's done in Iowa, a state that is often heralded for its nonpolitical map-drawing policy.

There, maps are drawn on census criteria by a nonpartisan professional staff of the state legislature. The N.C. state House passed legislation based on Iowa's model in 2011, but it didn't move in the Senate. During the most recent legislative session, the bill was reintroduced in the House, with 61 members signing on as co-sponsors, but it never moved from the Committee on Elections.

Rep. Susi Hamilton, D-New Hanover, was one of those co-sponsors. She says partisan redistricting as it's done in North Carolina and many states across the country has led to the “tea party phenomenon.”

And its effect of producing fringe candidates on both sides of the aisle could be seen “in the refusal we witnessed in Washington a couple of weeks ago for each party to communicate and compromise.”

That partisan rift can be felt on a smaller scale in North Carolina, she said, noting that during the most recent legislative session “some really wacky stuff got through.”