North Carolina Democrats are introducing a bill in Congress that would require states to incorporate public participation in their redistricting processes.
U.S. Reps. Deborah Ross, Wiley Nickel and Valerie Foushee on Thursday called on Congress to pass their new bill, which they call The Redistricting Transparency and Accountability Act. They believe it would ultimately curb partisan gerrymandering. Ross, Nickel and Foushee represent different parts of the Triangle. They said they plan to file the bill with the state’s four other Congressional Democrats.
Each state is responsible for drawing new Congressional and legislative district maps every ten years. Some states have enacted anti-gerrymandering regulations; many have not. Lawmakers in many states have been accused of using their legislative majorities to draw maps that benefit their political party. That includes North Carolina, where the GOP recently adopted new election maps that will likely send more Republicans to Congress, as well as secure GOP majorities in the legislature for years to come.
Standing inside North Carolina’s state legislature, Congressional Democrats criticized state Republicans for meeting behind closed doors to craft election maps that benefit the GOP. The number of Democrats in the state's 14-member congressional delegation is expected to drop from seven to three or four members after the upcoming election. Multiple lawsuits seeking to strike down the maps claim that even if most voters cast their ballots for Democrats in the upcoming elections, Republicans will still likely win most of the congressional and legislative seats.
“In October, the Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly enacted egregiously gerrymandered congressional and General Assembly maps that effectively silenced the voice of many North Carolina voters,” Ross said. “And they drew these maps behind closed doors with minimal public input.”
Under the bill, state lawmakers would be required to hold public hearings during the redistricting process — both before and after new congressional districts are formally proposed. In North Carolina, legislators held public hearings at three locations across the state before introducing new election maps. But they held no hearings once the maps had been made public, drawing criticism from good-government advocates as well as Democratic lawmakers.
The bill would also require states to post online all videos of public meetings, written comments pertaining to redistricting, and every iteration of proposed congressional maps.
“Were national political committees like the NRCC (the National Republican Congressional Committee) involved in drafting our state’s map? The people of North Carolina deserve to know,” Ross said.
The new state budget that Republicans passed in 2023 took a step in the opposite direction, making it so that public records laws no longer apply to any communications among state legislators about redistricting. The new law also allows lawmakers to personally decide whether any of their other communications, on any other topics, should be considered public records.
The office of North Carolina state Senate Leader Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, whose chamber drew the state’s congressional maps, didn’t immediately comment on the Democrats’ claims or proposed bill. Republicans have previously acknowledged that they did use political considerations when drawing some of the new districts, pointing to a 2023 ruling by the North Carolina Supreme Court that allowed them to do so.
The legislation isn’t likely to go anywhere soon, since Republicans control the U.S. House of Representatives and Democrats control the U.S. Senate. Ross said she hopes Democrats can take control of both chambers and pass the bill.
But it’s also not clear that Democratic leadership would go along with gerrymandering reforms. Another anti-gerrymandering bill, which sponsors call the Freedom To Vote Act, failed to pass in 2021 even when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress.
Around the country, politically motivated gerrymandering frequently has support among both political parties, depending on who controls the legislature. Heavily Democratic New York is in the process of redrawing its own maps now, possibly in time for the 2024 elections. Some political experts believe that New York legislators could flip enough seats for Democrats to cancel out gains made by Republicans in North Carolina.