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When a state court in North Carolina canceled the state's political policy cards nearly two weeks ago, she said they had been established "with surgical precision" to allow Republicans to keep the control of the two rooms.
On Tuesday, state lawmakers approved new voter cards – drawn up under a court directive aimed at ignoring partisan considerations – that seem to give Republicans a slight political edge, some experts said.
Republican lawmakers rejected early valuations as acidic grapes. Democrats who have sued for overthrowing the old cards have always sought "a democratic judicial gerrymander that ensures a democratic majority," Senate chief Phil Berger, a Republican from south-central North Carolina, said in a statement. . "There is no equitable card, and it has never been."
The state court that threw out the original cards will have the last word this fall and will decide on their fairness after an analysis by an expert from Stanford University.
A preliminary map analysis conducted by PlanScore, a non-partisan group that analyzes the political and demographic trends of maps nationally, suggested that maps were an improvement over their predecessors.
"House and Senate cards are significantly less biased toward Republicans than the plans that the court invalidated," said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at the University of Chicago and expert on gerrymandering, in a letter electronic. "The two cards, however, retain a modest pro-Republican bias, with the House card running a little worse than the Senate card."
Mr. Stephanopoulos, however, added that the analysis of the cards did not take into account the benefits of room occupancy. And this advantage was at the root of much of the skepticism expressed on Tuesday by some Democrats.
A panel of three state court judges unanimously ordered the redrawing, after Democrats and voters contested parts of the old cards, claiming they violated the guarantees of freedom of expression and elections organized by the Constitution. The decision was a blow to Republicans, who control the legislature in one of the country's most divided states, and said state courts could act to restrain obviously partisan electoral cards after the Supreme Court's decision of the United States in June, by a margin of 5 to 4, which the federal courts could not.
Many legal experts have stated that they expect a series of similar lawsuits in state courts across the country. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court cited provisions in its Constitution to cancel the state convention card in January 2018.
The final votes on the new cards in North Carolina followed days of drafting by the legislative committees of both chambers, their work being posted on courtroom screens and broadcast live online to meet the requirement for courts to be held in public.
Leaders on both sides described the process as the most transparent process in the history of states; The Republicans had drawn in secret the invalid card game, relying on the advice of a Republican party expert on gerrymandering.
Senator Dan Blue, the main Democrat in this chamber, said that the writing of the Senate map was "a remarkable experience, especially considering the current political climate" in this critical critical state.
The Republicans who controlled the two card-making committees made considerable efforts to emphasize the non-partisan nature of the work, which began with a lottery selection of two randomly generated political cards as reformulation models. The cards were drawn from thousands of people that the plaintiffs had produced in the lawsuit in order to establish a statistical argument against Republican gerrymandering.
Critics, however, quickly noted that the Senate's baseline was drawn from a set of random cards that represented an outgoing president, in a chamber where nearly six out of ten incumbents are Republicans. The reference level of the House did not consider incumbents – but one of the central principles of the drafting process was to give legislators in place, 55% of whom were Republicans, the right to vote. opportunity to chart their own limits.
The basic situation of the House was further complicated by the fact that it had "cradled" several Democratic legislators in the same districts, forcing them to divide the district democrats among themselves in order to increase their chances of re-election. Only a handful of Republicans face the same problem.
The court order had stated that cartographers could consider assuming the responsibility of setting limits, but did not require it.
"Legislators being legislators, they were doing things beneficial to themselves," said J. Michael Bitzer, North Carolina Policy Specialist at Catawba College. "You are trying to protect incumbents in place because they have the highest percentages of reelection."
In the House, Democrats have noted that Republicans have refused the Democrat leader's request to sit on the redistricting committee, preferring legislators who have not yet drafted political cards. The committee was also criticized for failing to hold a public hearing on its map until it was designed and approved by the entire House.
Republicans said the Senate would be able to make the changes suggested by the public when it would take the card. In the end, no changes were made.
Representative Robert Reives, a Democrat on the House redistricting committee, said that he was not saying that Republicans had been engaged in "some kind of deliberate intentionality. But he added that he thought that in the end, the Republicans still retained an advantage.
Common Cause North Carolina, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led to the rephrasing, will submit a formal comment on the cards later, said his deputy director, Brent Laurenz.
"We were a little disappointed with the lack of public participation in the process," he said, and legislators in the House seemed to have tweaked some districts "more than necessary."
"There were still politicians walking around their neighborhoods to their advantage," he said. "It was interesting, I suppose, to see them go up there.
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