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      North Carolina Court Upholds Republican Gerrymander of Maps

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      The ruling set up a final battle over the maps in the state Supreme Court, where Democrats hold a slim edge.WASHINGTON — A North Carolina state court on Tuesday rejected claims by voting rights advocates that Republican gerrymanders of the state’s political maps were unconstitutional.The unanimous ruling, by a panel of two Republican judges and one Democrat, set up a final battle over the maps in the seven-member state Supreme Court, where Democratic justices hold a slim edge. Voting rights groups said they would file an appeal immediately. One, Common Cause North Carolina, said the plaintiffs had presented “overwhelming evidence” that the maps were stacked to favor Republicans.“The evidence clearly showed that Republican legislative leaders brazenly ignored legal requirements designed to protect voting rights for Black North Carolinians,” the group’s executive director, Bob Phillips, said in a statement. “If allowed to stand, these extreme gerrymanders would cause profound and lasting harm to the people of our state.”The Republican chairman of the redistricting committee in the State Senate, Warren Daniel, called the decision a sign that “the people of our state should be able to move on with the 2022 electoral process.” The state’s primary elections were pushed back from March to May to make time for legal challenges to the maps.Redistricting at a GlanceEvery 10 years, each state in the U.S is required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional and state legislative districts in a process known as redistricting.Redistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.Breaking Down Texas’s Map: How redistricting efforts in Texas are working to make Republican districts even more red.G.O.P.’s Heavy Edge: Republicans are poised to capture enough seats to take the House in 2022, thanks to gerrymandering alone.Legal Options Dwindle: Persuading judges to undo skewed political maps was never easy. A shifting judicial landscape is making it harder.Mr. Daniel charged that any Supreme Court reversal would be suspect because one of the Democratic justices, Anita Earls, was elected with the help of a donation from a Democratic Party redistricting group. An affiliate of that group, the National Redistricting Foundation, is funding legal action by one of the plaintiffs in the gerrymander case.In their ruling, in Wake County Superior Court in Raleigh, N.C., the three judges agreed that both the legislative and congressional maps were “a result of intentional, pro-Republican partisan redistricting.” They also alluded to the political harm that caused, citing their “disdain for having to deal with issues that potentially lead to results incompatible with democratic principles and subject our state to ridicule.”But the judges dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims that the maps violated the state Constitution, that they were deliberately created to disenfranchise Black voters and that they broke longstanding rules for drawing political districts.The case involves new political districts approved in December by the Republican-dominated State Legislature that would give Republicans an overwhelming political advantage in a state balanced almost evenly between Republican and Democratic voters.The new congressional map would give Republicans control of as many as 11 of the state’s 14 House seats, compared to the party’s current eight-to-five edge. (North Carolina gained a fourteenth district as a result of population gains in the 2020 census.) The maps would also re-establish much of the lopsided advantage that Republicans enjoyed in the House and State Senate as a result of gerrymanders approved when those maps were redrawn in 2011.Understand How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Clay Aiken, Former ‘American Idol’ Star, Announces Run for Congress

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      Mr. Aiken said he was running as a “loud and proud Democrat” for an open House seat in his native North Carolina this year.Clay Aiken, the former “American Idol” contestant, said on Monday that he was running for Congress in North Carolina, in his second attempt to represent the state where he grew up.On his new website, Mr. Aiken, 43, referred to himself as a “loud and proud Democrat” and said he would be running in a newly drawn district that includes Durham and Chapel Hill. Representative David E. Price, a Democrat who currently represents much of that area, announced his retirement in October.“I intend to use my voice to deliver real results for North Carolina families, just like David Price has done for decades,” Mr. Aiken, a native of Raleigh, wrote. “I’ll always stand up for my principles and fight for inclusion, income equality, free access to quality health care, and combating climate change.”Mr. Aiken, who placed second behind Ruben Studdard in the second season of “American Idol” in 2003, previously ran for Congress in a Republican-leaning part of the state in 2014. He won the Democratic primary but was defeated in the general election by the Republican incumbent.Last month, the North Carolina Supreme Court ordered that the state’s 2022 primary election, originally scheduled for March 8, be postponed until May 17, citing a “need for urgency” in giving critics of the state legislature’s gerrymandered political maps additional time to pursue a legal battle to redraw them. New boundaries for state legislative districts and North Carolina’s 14 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives face three lawsuits filed by Democrats and voting-rights advocates in state court in Raleigh.Mr. Aiken is joining a crowded Democratic primary field that includes two state senators and a Durham County commissioner, The News & Observer reported.Mr. Aiken said his first experience with politics came when he was in the eighth grade and asked Mr. Price to speak to his class. Mr. Price agreed.“In Congress, I’ll use my voice to advocate for common-sense policies that encourage continued job growth and healthy communities,” Mr. Aiken wrote. “Many of these political battles divide us as people, threaten our democracy, and weaken America. North Carolinians are worried about affordable health care and rapid inflation.”Mr. Aiken studied at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and taught special education in Wake County. He is a co-founder of the National Inclusion Project, which advocates for disabled children, and he worked with UNICEF as a national goodwill ambassador, according to his website. More

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      Map by Map, G.O.P. Chips Away at Black Democrats’ Power

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      Black elected officials in several states, from Congress down to the counties, have been drawn out of their districts this year or face headwinds to hold onto their seats.More than 30 years ago, Robert Reives Sr. marched into a meeting of his county government in Sanford, N.C., with a demand: Create a predominantly Black district in the county, which was 23 percent Black at the time but had no Black representation, or face a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act.The county commission refused, and Mr. Reives prepared to sue. But after the county settled and redrew its districts, he was elected in 1990 as Lee County’s first Black commissioner, a post he has held comfortably ever since.Until this year.Republicans, newly in power and in control of the redrawing of county maps, extended the district to the northeast, adding more rural and suburban white voters to the mostly rural district southwest of Raleigh and effectively diluting the influence of its Black voters. Mr. Reives, who is still the county’s only Black commissioner, fears he will now lose his seat.“They all have the same objective,” he said in an interview, referring to local Republican officials. “To get me out of the seat.”Mr. Reives is one of a growing number of Black elected officials across the country — ranging from members of Congress to county commissioners — who have been drawn out of their districts, placed in newly competitive districts or bundled into new districts where they must vie against incumbents from their own party.Almost all of the affected lawmakers are Democrats, and most of the mapmakers are white Republicans. The G.O.P. is currently seeking to widen its advantage in states including North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia and Texas, and because partisan gerrymandering has long been difficult to disentangle from racial gerrymandering, proving the motive can be troublesome.But the effect remains the same: less political power for communities of color.The pattern has grown more pronounced during this year’s redistricting cycle, the first since the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and allowed jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination to pass election laws and draw political maps without approval from the Justice Department.How Maps Reshape American PoliticsWe answer your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.“Let’s call it a five-alarm fire,” G.K. Butterfield, a Black congressman from North Carolina, said of the current round of congressional redistricting. He is retiring next year after Republicans removed Pitt County, which is about 35 percent Black, from his district.“I just didn’t see it coming,” he said in an interview. “I did not believe that they would go to that extreme.”Redistricting at a GlanceEvery 10 years, each state in the U.S is required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional and state legislative districts in a process known as redistricting.Redistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.Breaking Down Texas’s Map: How redistricting efforts in Texas are working to make Republican districts even more red.G.O.P.’s Heavy Edge: Republicans are poised to capture enough seats to take the House in 2022, thanks to gerrymandering alone.Legal Options Dwindle: Persuading judges to undo skewed political maps was never easy. A shifting judicial landscape is making it harder.A former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Mr. Butterfield said fellow Black members of Congress were increasingly worried about the new Republican-drawn maps. “We are all rattled,” he said.In addition to Mr. Butterfield, four Black state senators in North Carolina, five Black members of the state House of Representatives and several Black county officials have had their districts altered in ways that could cost them their seats. Nearly 24 hours after the maps were passed, civil rights groups sued the state.Representative G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina said he was retiring next year after Republicans removed Pitt County, which is 35 percent Black, from his district.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesAcross the country, the precise number of elected officials of color who have had their districts changed in such ways is difficult to pinpoint. The New York Times identified more than two dozen of these officials, but there are probably significantly more in county and municipal districts. And whose seats are vulnerable or safe depends on a variety of factors, including the political environment at the time of elections.But the number of Black legislators being drawn out of their districts outpaces that of recent redistricting cycles, when voting rights groups frequently found themselves in court trying to preserve existing majority-minority districts as often as they sought to create new ones.“Without a doubt it’s worse than it was in any recent decade,” said Leah Aden, a deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. “We have so much to contend with and it’s all happening very quickly.”Republicans, who have vastly more control over redistricting nationally than Democrats do, defend their maps as legal and fair, giving a range of reasons.Kirk Smith, the Republican chairman of Lee County’s board of commissioners, said that “to say only a person of a certain racial or ethnic group can represent only a person of the same racial or ethnic group has all the trappings of ethnocentric racism.”In North Carolina and elsewhere, Republicans say that their new maps are race-blind, meaning officials used no racial data in designing the maps and therefore could not have drawn racially discriminatory districts because they had no idea where communities of color were.“During the 2011 redistricting process, legislators considered race when drawing districts,” Ralph Hise, a Republican state senator in North Carolina, said in a statement. Through a spokesperson, he declined to answer specific questions, citing pending litigation.His statement continued: “We were then sued for considering race and ordered to draw new districts. So during this process, legislators did not use any racial data when drawing districts, and we’re now being sued for not considering race.”In other states, mapmakers have declined to add new districts with majorities of people of color even though the populations of minority residents have boomed. In Texas, where the population has increased by four million since the 2010 redistricting cycle, people of color account for more than 95 percent of the growth, but the State Legislature drew two new congressional seats with majority-white populations.And in states like Alabama and South Carolina, Republican map drawers are continuing a decades-long tradition of packing nearly all of the Black voting-age population into a single congressional district, despite arguments from voters to create two separate districts. In Louisiana, Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said on Thursday that the Republican-controlled State Legislature should draw a second majority-Black House district.Allison Riggs, a co-executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a civil rights group, said that the gerrymandering was “really an attack on Black voters, and the Black representatives are the visible outcome of that.”Efforts to curb racial gerrymandering have been hampered by a 2019 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that partisan gerrymandering could not be challenged in federal court.Though the court did leave intact Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial gerrymandering, it offered no concrete guidance on how to distinguish between a partisan gerrymander and a racial gerrymander when the result was both, such as in heavily Democratic Black communities.Understand How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      North Carolina Supreme Court Delays 2022 Primary Elections

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      In response to lawsuits over North Carolina’s political maps, the justices issued an order on Wednesday pushing back the state’s primaries from March to May.The North Carolina Supreme Court ordered a two-month delay in the state’s 2022 primary elections on Wednesday, giving critics of the state legislature’s gerrymandered political maps additional time to pursue a legal battle to redraw them.The unsigned ruling was a setback for the Republican-controlled General Assembly, which created the maps and had argued that a delay in the primaries would sow chaos among both candidates and voters.The court ordered the March 8 primary elections for all offices postponed until May 17, citing “the importance of the issues to the constitutional jurisprudence of this state, and the need for urgency” in deciding the maps’ legality. New boundaries for state legislative districts and for North Carolina’s 14 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives face three lawsuits filed by Democrats and voting-rights advocates in a state court in Raleigh.In a state split almost evenly between Republican and Democratic voters, the new maps give Republicans a sweeping political advantage. The new House map, for example, would all but ensure victory for G.O.P. candidates in 10 of the 14 districts, with a decent shot at winning an 11th seat.The legal struggle over the new boundaries appears to have split state judges along political lines as well. On Monday, Republicans had secured a ruling in the state Court of Appeals, which is dominated by Republican judges, upholding the March 8 primary date. The state Supreme Court, which overruled the decision, is narrowly controlled by Democratic justices.The Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which is representing the plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits, hailed the ruling as a victory for voters.“It sends a clear message that North Carolinians deserve to cast their ballots in elections held in fair, constitutional voting districts,” Hilary Harris Klein, the group’s senior voting rights lawyer, said in a statement.Republican state legislators issued a news release calling the ruling a political power grab. “The Democrats on the Supreme Court want districts that elect more Democrats, so they’re blocking every election in the state until they get their way,” one Republican, State Senator Ralph Hise, said.Delays in primary elections resulting from gerrymandering lawsuits are not unusual. Federal judges twice postponed the 2012 primary election in Texas as part of a redistricting dispute. North Carolina, where there have been more lawsuits over redistricting than in many other states, also has a history of postponement: The State Board of Elections ordered the 2004 primaries delayed during one of those court battles.The state Supreme Court issued a vastly expedited schedule for resolving the gerrymandering litigation, beginning with an order that the state Superior Court in Raleigh hand down an initial ruling next month. The Supreme Court also has signaled that appeals of that ruling will be accelerated as well.The order to delay primary elections seems likely to further fuel Republican outrage over Supreme Court rulings that have gone against the party’s wishes.A former state Republican Party chairman suggested last month that the justices should be impeached for a ruling in a long-running dispute over state funding for education. The legislature appears to agree and has added impeachment to its agenda for a special legislative session starting late this month. More

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      Podcast Looks at Voting Fraud Claims in North Carolina

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      The podcast series “The Improvement Association” investigates the role that rumors and race play in a North Carolina county.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.By all accounts, election fraud is rare.But following the 2018 election, the small, rural community of Bladen County, N.C., made news when state officials threw out the results of a congressional race over suspicions of fraud.Two years earlier, in the same county, state officials received similar reports of vote rigging, although those turned out to be unfounded.Zoe Chace, a producer for the podcast “Serial” and the radio program “This American Life,” set out to understand how Bladen County became fertile ground for these allegations. The result of her reporting is “The Improvement Association,” a five-part podcast series produced by Serial Productions and The New York Times. The episodes explore the corrosive power of claims of election fraud and the role that race played in those claims in Bladen County.“Bladen County was consumed with rumors and accusations of election fraud long before the 2020 presidential election, and we wanted to understand how that happened and how it has affected people’s lives there,” Ms. Chace said.Ms. Chace first spent time in Bladen County while reporting a radio story for “This American Life.” In 2016, local Republicans had accused the Bladen County Improvement Association PAC, a Black Democratic enfranchisement group, of tampering with absentee ballots, but the claims were dismissed by officials.Several years earlier, the group had helped elect the county’s first Black sheriff using a novel tactic — encouraging Black voters to use absentee ballots. Although completely legal, the method fueled suspicions of cheating. In the years that followed, white residents began to regularly accuse the Bladen County Improvement Association of election tampering, although there was no evidence.Then, in a rare event, state officials threw out the 2018 election of Mark Harris, a Republican, to the congressional district that includes Bladen County, after local Republicans were accused of committing absentee-ballot fraud. McCrae Dowless, the political operative at the center of the scandal, has been charged with obstruction of justice and illegal possession of an absentee ballot. The case is in progress.After that case became public, a leader of the Bladen County Improvement Association reached out to Ms. Chace, offering to explain the local political landscape where these allegations had become common, and Ms. Chace returned to the community.She first looked at the claims against the association, interviewing poll workers, political boosters and officials from the North Carolina State Board of Elections. She also reviewed absentee ballot envelopes from nursing home residents that some claimed had been tampered with, and she pored over years of election fraud complaints and documents from the state board of elections. She couldn’t find anything to suggest that the group had cheated.“We were lucky because we got a lot of documents,” Ms. Chace said.Nancy Updike, the producer of the series, said they also studied the history of racism in election fraud allegations, which have been used to disenfranchise Black voters. Ms. Updike said that in U.S. elections, the idea of Black people casting votes has frequently led to claims from white people about voter fraud.“From Reconstruction until now, white Americans have repeatedly conjured the idea of Black Americans voting fraudulently in order to keep Black people from voting,” she said.Ms. Chace’s reporting also showed how damaging these allegations of fraud can be. For the Bladen County Improvement Association, the claims were difficult to shake and led to animosity and divisions within the organization. In the end, the years of unfounded allegations have eroded the group’s political power.“The charge of election fraud, untethered to any evidence, is a truly dangerous force at work in America right now,” Ms. Updike said. “And in this one place you can see how it tore up people’s lives as well as pulled at the fabric of this place.” More

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      China, Fauci and hoaxes: Donald Trump takes aim at usual suspects in return to stage

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      Donald Trump has returned to the stage in predictable fashion as he launched a more active phase of his post presidency: criticising Covid expert Anthony Fauci, calling for China to pay reparations over the pandemic and denouncing the New York attorney general’s criminal investigation into his business dealings.At a GOP convention in North Carolina on Saturday night, Trump was introduced by the state’s party chairman Michael Whatley as “our president”, a nod to Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him through voter fraud, which Trump branded on Saturday “the crime of the century”.His appearance had all the hallmarks of his signature campaign rallies, complete with a musical playlist heavy on Elton John.Urging Republicans to support only Trump loyalists in next year’s midterm elections, Trump teased the prospect of another presidential bid of his own in 2024, but vowed first to join the campaign trail for those who share his values in next year’s fight for control of Congress.“The survival of America depends on our ability to elect Republicans at every level starting with the midterms next year,” he said early in a rambling speech that lasted nearly an hour-and-a-half.Some party leaders worry that a rise of pro-Trump candidates in the coming months could jeopardise the GOP’s fight for control of Congress in 2022. While Trump remains a dominant force within his party, he is deeply unpopular among key segments of the broader electorate. He lost the last election by 7 million votes after alienating Republican-leaning suburban voters across the country.The former president joined wider Republican criticism of Fauci – the US’s leading infectious diseases official – for asking Americans to wear masks to guard against the virus and for at times being sceptical of a hotly contested theory that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.He called Fauci “not a great doctor but a great promoter” for his frequent television appearances. “But he’s been wrong on almost every issue and he was wrong on Wuhan and the lab also,” Trump said.Trump’s own handling of the pandemic, in which nearly 600,000 people in the United States have died and he himself was infected, was a factor in his loss to president Joe Biden in 2020. He also called on China to pay $10tn in reparations to the US and the world for its own handling of the virus, and he said nations should cancel their debt to Beijing.Trump said a criminal investigation launched by the New York attorney general’s office was “the ultimate fishing expedition” and the latest attempt by Democrats to bring him down after two impeachment sagas when he was president. “It’s been a five-year witch hunt, hoax after hoax,” said Trump. “They’ll never stop until November of 2024.”New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, has been investigating whether the Trump Organization falsely reported property values to secure loans and obtain economic and tax benefits.Trump’s speech to hundreds of Republican officials and activists was the opening appearance in what is expected to be a new phase of rallies and public events. Out of office for more than four months and banned from his preferred social media accounts, the former president hopes to use such events to elevate his diminished voice.His advisers are already eyeing subsequent appearances in Ohio, Florida, Alabama and Georgia to help bolster midterm candidates and energise voters.On Friday, Facebook decided to suspend his account for two years, after he incited supporters to attack the US Capitol in service of his lie that his defeat by Biden was the result of electoral fraud. At the end of the suspension period, Facebook said, it would work with experts to assess the risk to public safety posed by reinstating Trump’s accountIn contrast to the mega rallies that filled sports arenas when Trump was president, on Saturday he faced a crowd that organisers estimated at 1,200 seated at dinner tables inside the Greenville convention centre. Many more followed along on internet streams.The former president waited more than an hour to advance falsehoods about the 2020 election, which he described as “the crime of the century”.Since leaving the White House, Trump has regularly made baseless claims that the last presidential election was stolen. The claims have triggered a wave of Republican-backed voting restrictions in state legislatures across the country, even though Trump’s cries of voting fraud have been refuted by dozens of judges, Republican governors and senior officials from his own administration.Trump focused his early remarks on Biden’s White House, which he called “the most radical left-wing administration in history”. “As we gather tonight our country is being destroyed before our very eyes,” he said.Democratic National Committee spokesman Ammar Moussa took a shot at Trump in a statement released ahead of his speech.“More than 400,000 dead Americans, millions of jobs lost, and recklessly dangerous rhetoric is apparently not enough for Republicans to break with a loser president who cost them the White House, Senate, and House,” Moussa said.Invited to the stage briefly, Trump daughter-in-law and North Carolina native Lara Trump announced she would not run for the Senate because of family obligations. “I am saying no for now, not no forever,” she said. 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