The state Supreme Court is scheduled to hear opening arguments today in a case that will decide whether North Carolina will have to redraw its legislative district lines--and how long the political process leading up to the elections this fall will continue to be delayed.
At issue is a lawsuit that contends that the General Assembly drew the districts it uses to elect itself unconstitutionally last year. A superior court judge, Knox Jenkins, upheld that claim in February, leading to a decision in March by the state Board of Elections to postpone the primaries for all the elections scheduled for this November.
When the primaries will be held is still up in the air, due to the redistricting case and a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court that challenges the 2000 federal census, which gave North Carolina an additional seat in Congress.
"It depends on the court decisions," said Gary Bartlett, executive director of the elections board. "I would hope not [after September]."
If both decisions go in the state's favor, the primaries could be held as early as five weeks after the original May 7 date. But if either one goes against the state, the Legislature would have to redraw district lines and get them reapproved, which could take until August or September.
That would be somewhat unusual but not unheard of, experts say.
"It's been done on several occasions," said Robinson Everett, a professor at Duke's School of Law who has also argued against the state in several redistricting cases.
"For example, in 1998, there was rescheduling of a primary in North Carolina because of a [congressional redistricting] plan that was unconstitutional," he said.
At that time, the elections board decided to hold two separate sets of primaries--the congressional races in mid-September, the others in May as usual--but this year, because both the state legislative and the congressional races are in question, the board decided to postpone all the primaries.
"The other side of it is, you know, it really costs a lot of money to run these primaries," said Thad Beyle, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He added that primaries were delayed in 1982 as well, again because of redistricting.
Everett, who is planning to file an amicus brief to the Supreme Court supporting Jenkins' decision, said he hopes repeated court decisions against the state's redistricting plans will eventually convince the Legislature to change the way it approaches redistricting, which he criticized for being too focused on keeping incumbents in power.
"At a certain point, if the court keeps rapping their knuckles, they're going to try to do it the right way," he said. "You can avoid the gerrymander with a reasonable amount of effort. It's a matter of the will, not the way."
Today's case will focus primarily on Republicans' contentions that the Democrat-controlled Legislature needlessly split up counties--against the state's constitution--in an attempt to protect Democratic incumbents and set up racially gerrymandered districts.
Beyle explained that the provision in the state constitution requiring county lines to be preserved when drawing districts was added after the federal Voting Rights Act, which requires redistricting decisions in southern states to be pre-cleared by the federal justice department. That could make the provision itself unconstitutional, legitimizing this year's district lines.
"They broke county boundaries, and the state constitution says, 'Thou shalt not break county boundaries,'" Beyle said.
"[But] there's some question as to whether it is constitutional to have that in there because of the Voting Rights Act."
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