North Carolina lawmakers did not intentionally discriminate against minority voters in the 2023 drawing of the state’s congressional map, a federal district court ruled Thursday evening.
However, the judges’ decision does not apply to an ongoing challenge to 2025 redistricting.
A group of voters and several voting groups challenged various congressional and state Senate districts after Republican lawmakers redrew congressional maps in late 2023. They alleged that lawmakers intentionally diluted the voting power of minority voters in various areas of the state.
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The three-judge panel was not convinced. In their 181-page opinion, the judges wrote that plaintiffs had not proven any discriminatory intent, and in this case, the impact on minority voters wasn’t enough to strike down the maps.
While the First Congressional District was originally one of the challenged districts in the 2023 congressional map, it was not part of this order. Lawmakers again redrew that district in October to give Republicans the best shot at an additional seat in the U.S. House, according to the primary map drawer, Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell.
Plaintiffs addressed the development by adding onto their lawsuit with a new, First Amendment argument. The same panel of judges are currently considering that complaint on a preliminary basis to determine whether the 2025 congressional map can be used for the upcoming 2026 elections. Candidate filing begins Dec. 1, and maps have to be decided by then. The judges indicated that they would issue an order as soon as possible in that portion of the case during Wednesday’s hearing.
The partial order may be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, though no decision has been made yet, according to the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which is representing some of the plaintiffs in the case.
“We are disappointed with the ruling and currently reviewing the decision to inform next steps,” SCSJ spokesperson Melissa Boughton said in a statement.
The challenge
Republican lawmakers redrew electoral maps in late 2023, after a newly Republican state Supreme Court pulled an about-face on the legality of partisan gerrymandering.
A group of voters and the North Carolina chapters of Common Cause and the NAACP challenged the new congressional map. While they could no longer sue over partisan gerrymandering, they alleged that lawmakers were still gerrymandering based on race.
Lawmakers used a pair of strategies to weaken the voting power of racial minorities in four congressional districts, they alleged.
First, plaintiffs argued that lawmakers used “cracking” to split up minority communities across multiple districts so that they would not have an opportunity to be competitive or elect their preferred candidate in any district.
This was the case, they argued, in northeast North Carolina’s First District. There, lawmakers moved whiter counties into the district and removed minority communities.
Plaintiffs contended that lawmakers also diluted minority voting power by cracking in the Sixth District. The 2023 congressional map reduced the district’s combined Black and Latino voting age population from 36% to 24% by splitting Guilford County across three congressional districts and the Piedmont Triad region — including High Point, Winston-Salem and Greensboro — across four congressional districts.
The combined population of the Triad could have been contained in one district.
Second, Republicans used another strategy, “packing,” to weaken minority voting power in the Twelfth and Fourteenth Districts, plaintiffs argued.
The Twelfth District, encompassing Charlotte and most of Mecklenburg County, already had a combined Black and Latino voting age population of about 44%, while the neighboring, western Fourteenth District had about 28% Black and Latino voting age population. While neither is a majority, minority voters could typically elect their candidate of choice in the Twelfth District and had the opportunity to do so in the Fourteenth District with enough crossover from majority white voters.
However, the 2023 congressional map moved minority communities from the Fourteenth District to the Twelfth District to make the former even more favorable for minority voters and the latter much less. Plaintiffs argued that the point was to “pack” minority voters into as tight a space as possible so that they could only reasonably win one district, not two.
Each of these changes made districts less compact, and sometimes resulted in weird shapes due to the inclusion and exclusion of certain communities.
It’s political
Republican defendants had a simple rebuttal: they didn’t use racial data at all while redistricting. It wasn’t even in the computer.
In fact, their goal was purely partisan; to benefit Republicans at the expense of Democrats, as was newly permissible under state and federal judicial precedent.
The three Republican-appointed judges — Richard Myers, Thomas Schroeder and Allison Rushing — found that argument more credible. Besides, they wrote in the majority opinion, it’s almost impossible to separate politics from race in North Carolina voting patterns.
“Nearly any map that moves Democrats in or out of a district will disproportionately affect black North Carolinians, but that does not prove that the legislature acted with discriminatory intent,” the opinion stated. “Correlation is not causation.”
In other words, Black voters tend to be Democratic voters. If partisan gerrymandering is legal, and racial gerrymandering is not, but lawmakers would essentially end up drawing the same congressional map under either motivation, then courts have to decide which motivation is predominant.
In this case, the judges decided that partisanship seemed like a more likely motivation than race.
What does this mean for 2026?
The ruling makes it less likely judges will side with plaintiffs on the 2025 congressional map challenge, but it doesn’t deem it impossible, Western Carolina University professor Chris Cooper said.
The 2025 redistricting had a more extreme racial impact than the 2023 congressional map, for one. And there’s an additional argument in that portion of the case that has nothing to do with race. Plaintiffs are arguing that mid-decade redistricting in and of itself should not be allowed without a legitimate reason, and that the 2025 map unconstitutionally punishes voters based on their choices at the ballot in violation of the First Amendment.
“There’s still a chance,” Cooper said. “I think it’s low, but it was low before, frankly.”
Kat Roblez, Forward Justice senior voting rights counsel, is involved in the 2025 portion of the lawsuit.
She said it’s hard to know what the judges will decide, but it means something that they waited to issue a separate ruling on the 2025 maps.
“They could have obviously issued an order about both, so it appears to me that they feel like that is a different situation,” she said.
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