GOP Lawmakers Lied in Court About Racial Gerrymandering to Stop An Election

[C_Clayton_Jones]

Republicans are all criminals. They prove it every day.

Newly Discovered Files Suggest GOP Lawmakers Lied in Court About Racial Gerrymandering to Stop An Election

New Files From GOP Operative’s Hard Drive Suggest N.C. Republicans Lied in Court to Maintain Racial Gerrymander

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The latest bombshell from the formerly secret files of the GOP’s top gerrymandering guru emerged on Thursday, and it’s astounding: Voting rights advocates claim to have evidence that North Carolina Republican lawmakers repeatedly lied to a federal court, and to the public, in a successful effort to delay a special election that threatened their legislative supermajority.

Republicans across the country employed Thomas Hofeller for years to draw gerrymanders that would dilute Democratic votes. When he died in 2018, he left behind 18 thumb drives and four hard drives containing 75,000 files—a vast trove of information detailing his work for the GOP, including damning revelations. His estranged daughter turned over the material to Common Cause, a voting rights advocacy group, in February.

The newest discovery from the files pertains to Covington v. North Carolina, a challenge to Republicans’ racial gerrymander of state legislative districts. In 2016, a federal district court ordered the legislature to draw new maps and hold a special election after finding the map had been illegally gerrymandered along racial lines.

The Supreme Court agreed that the maps were unlawful, but sent the case back to district court to resolve how quickly Republican lawmakers could draw new maps without excessively disrupting the state’s elections. GOP legislators insisted that they had not yet prepared any maps and would need ample time to do so. So the district court declined to order the special election, allowing Republicans to maintain their supermajority for another year and further manipulate state elections. (The supermajority was broken in 2018, the next election under the new maps.)

According to Common Cause, these representations to the district court were a lie. Republican legislative leaders told the court that they had not “start[ed] the laborious process of redistricting earlier” than July 2017, and that they could only “begin the process of compiling a record in July 2017 with a goal of enacting new plans by the end of the year.” These lawmakers claimed they needed more time to “engage in internal discussions about the design of remedial districts” and “prepare draft remedial plans.” This effectively convinced the court to scrap the special election.

True.

Hence the reprehensible right.