Should voters have a say in redistricting? NC constitutional amendment proposal says yes
For years, North Carolina politicians on both sides of the aisle have used gerrymandering to reduce some voters’ influence and try to rig the maps in their favor. The latest attempt to change that, filed in the legislature on Monday, would let the people of the state decide how districts should be drawn.
A group of Democrats is proposing that the legislature’s Republican majority put their proposal on the ballot next year.
If passed into law, House Bill 437 or the “Fair Maps Act” would let voters decide whether to keep the current system for drawing political maps or change the state constitution. The proposed amendment would take redistricting power away from elected lawmakers and give it to an unelected commission.
Supporters say a commission would be less motivated by politics when it came to deciding which communities to include or exclude from certain political districts.
“It would reflect people’s values more if we had a legislature elected from fair maps,” said Greensboro Rep. Pricey Harrison, the bill’s lead sponsor. “And I don’t know when the last time that was. Decades? I don’t like to act like my party wasn’t the same. But the technology is much more sophisticated now.”
Something that might make the bill more palatable to the legislature’s Republican majority is it wouldn’t take away their power for the current redistricting cycle, since that has to be done before the 2022 elections when the amendment would be on the ballot.
If the maps lawmakers draw in the coming months were to be struck down later as unconstitutional, and the amendment passes, it’s possible the commission might take over the job of redrawing them. But if not, then the commission wouldn’t go into action for another decade, until the 2031 redistricting cycle.
Public support, political opposition
Opinion polling shows people largely support redistricting reform. A 2018 poll from liberal- leaning pollster Public Policy Polling, for example, found 59% of North Carolinians wanted a commission like the one Harrison is now proposing, while only 15% opposed the idea and another 28% weren’t sure.
But it has been an uphill battle at the legislature, under both parties.
Every state in the country must redraw its political maps every 10 years, and the North Carolina Constitution says that the legislature alone gets to do it. The governor is even banned from vetoing the maps, under rules Democrats wrote in the 1990s — ironically when current Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper was a top state senator.
With the guarantee of significant power to influence how a decade’s worth of elections might go, neither party’s legislative leaders have been willing to give up their ability to draw the maps and hand it over to an outside commission.
Harrison hopes she brings credibility to the fight, though.
She was one of the few Democrats in the legislature who supported reform even when her party was in charge and it was mostly Republicans who were clamoring for reform. Ever since the GOP took control of the legislature in 2011, though, the two parties have largely swapped opinions. Many Democratic lawmakers now support reform and many Republican lawmakers now oppose it.
“How many redistricting lawsuits have we had in the last decade?” Harrison said. “We’ve had three or four redraws in the last decade alone. North Carolina has become really ground zero for this, and I supported reform even when Democrats were in charge.”
Republican Senate leader Phil Berger said, after Republicans kept their legislative majority in the 2020 election, that he would back some changes, but not an independent commission, for the next round of redistricting. That’s expected to take place this fall and will create maps to be used through the 2030 elections, for both the N.C. House and Senate as well as North Carolina’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Multiple versions of Republican-drawn maps were struck down throughout the 2010s as unconstitutional, just as Democrat-drawn maps had been in the decades prior.
Berger told The News & Observer in late 2020 that he will ensure the process this time is more transparent, does not violate the constitution, and that “the legislature would be committed to making decisions that are based on criteria that is not inherently political or advantageous to one party or the other.”
Any GOP support for reform?
Reform advocates like Harrison don’t think Berger’s assurances go far enough, however. And while she acknowledged that Republicans might not like the exact version of the bill she filed with several other Democrats on Monday, she said she’s always willing to work across the aisle on finding a compromise.
“I’m forever hopeful that we can come up with a plan that everybody likes,” she said.
The Republican who had been the strongest supporter of redistricting changes recently, while his party was in power, was former Rep. Chuck McGrady of Hendersonville. He didn’t run for reelection in 2020. But there are others still in office who have sponsored bills to change the system — notably Reps. Sarah Stevens of Mount Airy and John Hardister of Whitsett, two of the highest-ranking Republicans in the House.
Hardister, however, wrote in an email Monday that he doesn’t expect any reform bill to pass in the near future.
“I am still a supporter of redistricting reform, but I don’t plan to sponsor legislation this year,” he said. “My workload has expanded in other areas and I also don’t believe there is consensus on redistricting reform at this time.”
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This story was originally published March 29, 2021 at 2:46 PM with the headline "Should voters have a say in redistricting? NC constitutional amendment proposal says yes."
