You’ve heard of Texas and California’s mid-decade redistricting efforts. You may know of North Carolina’s plans to redraw its Congressional map to give Republicans one more seat in the US House of Representatives. But one redistricting battle has likely escaped your attention. It’s in Watauga County, a bellwether county where Democratic-leaning Boone voters regularly take on Republican-leaning voters in the county’s outlying communities.
Two years ago, the North Carolina General Assembly changed how Watauga County’s board of commissioners elections were run and redrew district maps to give Republicans an advantage. When the community overwhelmingly voted to reject the new maps in the following election, it didn’t matter — the legislature had passed a second law effectively nullifying any attempt to defy the legislature’s wishes.
Also in the second law, the legislature aligned the county’s education board elections to the same disputed map.
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The change has already paid dividends for Republicans. In the 2024 election, the board of commissioners shifted from a 3-2 Democratic majority to a unanimous Republican board. Next year’s elections will be the first time the map is in place for education board elections.
State Sen. Ralph Hise, R- Mitchell, who sponsored both laws, explained his motivation without reserve during the legislative process; he told committee members the original bill was intended to address “the predominance of the university and others in the electoral process.”
Appalachian State University sits in the heart of Boone, and many of its students cast votes in federal, state and local elections using their college address. Hise told committee members that residents outside of Boone felt like they weren’t represented in county government, due primarily to the influence of these student voters.
“Watauga County is unique in the concept that in a county of 55,000 people you have a university on a very small footprint of temporary and four-year residents that represents 20,000 individuals in that county,” he said in June 2024.
Watauga voting rights groups have been in this position before. They’re prepared to stand their ground.
“I think (Hise has) underestimated the extent to which people in Watauga county would push back hard on the imposition of these two local bills on our county,” said Watauga County Voting Rights Taskforce member Stella Anderson.
Two bills, one referendum, zero Democrats
Hise is following simple political logic: younger voters tend to vote Democratic, and as a Republican, limiting their voting power is a good way to help his party, said Phillip Ardoin, a Watauga County political scientist.
“Elections are about politics,” Ardoin said. “For years, up until the mid ‘90s, Democrats in the South made rules and structured the electoral process to advantage them. And now that the Republicans are in control, we’re seeing them do the same.”
Before Senate Bill 759 passed, Watauga County used residency districts to elect its board of commissioners. All voters in the county chose their five commissioners on an at-large basis, although each commissioner had to live in a specified district. Under the system, Democrats had held a majority on the board of commissioners since 2016.
Hise’s bill switched the contest to a single-member electoral district system. Instead of voting for all five commissioners, Wataugans only voted for the commissioner who would represent the district where they lived.
In 2024, three of the commissioner seats were up for grabs in the new system — the three districts drawn with a majority Republican voting population. Republican Commissioners Todd Castle and Braxton Eggers weren’t up for reelection until 2026, but stepped down from their original seats to run in the new districts, and won. Republican Ronnie Marsh joined them as the third district winner, and the trio filled in the vacancies they had left behind with Republicans of their choice.
In 2026, elections will be run in Districts 1 and 2 — the districts encompassing Boone and Appalachian State University.
North Carolina law allows local communities to draw their own maps through referendum. Watauga County residents, upset with the legislature-drawn maps, decided to take that route in June 2024.
Days after the board announced plans to hold a referendum on the maps during the 2024 election, Hise filed Senate Bill 912. The legislation stated that any referendum that passed in Watauga County would take delayed effect in December 2032 — notably, after the 2030 Census reapportionment process deemed any pre-existing electoral map unusable.
Voters weighed in anyways. An overwhelming majority — 71% of voters — rejected the legislature-drawn maps in favor of locally-drawn maps. In the same election, Kamala Harris only secured 52% of the vote.
Weird Watauga district math and geometry
When politicians get away with drawing maps that entrench their party’s power, voters tend to abandon politics, said Omar Noureldin, Common Cause senior vice president of policy.
“They opt out of civic engagement, and for our democracy to thrive and be healthy and robust, we need everybody to be a part of our processes, to be part of our political system, and for them to believe that their political voice matters.”
That’s one reason Common Cause joined the Watauga County Voting Rights Task Force and seven Watauga voters in a federal lawsuit against the Watauga County Board of Elections over the maps on Oct. 1.
In the suit, they argue that the legislature’s maps break traditional redistricting guidelines and were imposed despite broad dissent to illegally dilute the voting power of students and urban residents.
When drawing electoral maps, districts must have nearly equal populations. If there’s over a 10% difference between the population of the district with the fewest and greatest number of voters, the map is unconstitutional. The idea behind the rule is to ensure that every voter’s vote counts as equally as possible.
While the Watauga map does not reach the 10% threshold, it gets very close with a population deviation of 9.58%.
“They did just enough to stay under that 10%, but it is unnecessary,” said Common Cause Executive Director Bob Phillips. “Certainly the map the voters approved did not have that kind of variant. But our contention is this is all part of the intent to rig the districts to what the Republican legislature, and in this case, Senator Ralph Hise, wanted.”
In Watauga’s new maps, a greater number of voters are in the two Democratic-leaning districts and fewer voters in the three Republican-leaning districts. Watauga voting rights groups argue that the discrepancy is intended to dilute the votes of Democrats, urban residents and student voters in the two larger districts.
They also take issue with other aspects of the maps, like the splitting of several precincts and the fact that District 2 is divided into three distinct pockets of land that are not connected. Keeping precincts whole and drawing contiguous districts are common redistricting criteria.
It would have been possible to draw a map that followed all the traditional rules — Watauga voting rights groups did it with the map used for the 2024 referendum vote. That map had three electoral districts and two county-wide at-large districts. Its population deviation was 3.43%, it split no precincts and had only contiguous districts.
Plaintiffs want the legislature-drawn maps to be struck down and replaced with either the referendum map or another map acceptable to a majority of voters.
Watauga repeating Greensboro’s history?
Greensboro residents may be feeling deja vu. About a decade ago, the legislature changed Greensboro’s city council election method, drew maps with high population deviations and banned the city from making further changes to the election structure via referendum or ballot initiative.
In 2017, a North Carolina district court ruled against legislators, stating that the new maps violated the “one person, one vote” principle and that there was no “legitimate government interest” in singling out Greensboro in its referendum ban.
Greensboro resident Richard Koritz and his wife were two of several plaintiffs in that case. He said they strongly believe that voters should pick their representatives, not the other way around.
But the 2017 win wasn’t the end of the battle.
“We have to be eternally vigilant about our freedom,” Koritz said, paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson.
Ardoin said Hise might be betting on the makeup of the court being different than it was in 2017, when the Greensboro case was decided.
“We’re seeing that right now at the federal level with the Voting Rights Act,” he said. “There, the current Supreme Court is overturning decades of precedent in numerous cases. So I assume the current state legislators are hoping that a new set of judges might rule in their favor, or they just want to keep pressing the case.”
‘Like wildfire.’ Why this matters.
County commissioners have important decisions to make about land development, zoning and the distribution of tax revenues between the county and towns as Watauga County grows.
Democrats on the board have limited development due to environmental concerns in recent years, Ardoin said. A partisan flip could change the board’s stance.
Beyond policy changes, Ardoin wonders whether community-wide opposition to the maps could hurt Hise’s reelection campaign.
Anderson said the broader redistricting context helps people understand why Watauga’s redistricting case matters. They may not be able to do anything to stop what’s happening on the national or state level, but they might be able to push back in their county, she said.
While Common Cause is busy addressing more high-profile redistricting efforts, Noureldin couldn’t let Watauga County fly under the radar.
“Once this gets out of hand, it’s like wildfire, and it can’t be contained,” he said.
He has a message for the legislature: “We’re watching you.”
“We’re going to fight for every community no matter how small, no matter how hidden from the limelight,” he said. “Because if they succeed here, they’ll go to the next county and the next county, and then folks in other states will say, ‘Hey, they did it in North Carolina. We can do it here too.’”
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