Your Jan. 3 editorial "Boundary wars," about the weird districts drawn by Republican legislators, was on target. Democrats maneuvered lines to their advantage, too, but the GOP contortions go way overboard, to the point of dividing streets by the residents' race.
Voters in the same precinct will be handed different ballots - 12 or more different versions in many precincts. (Heaven help the poll workers to keep all this straight.) Your neighbor is in the same state House district, but a different Senate district, while the one down the street is in your Senate district but a different House district. The Republican district lines cut up hundreds of precincts affecting two million eligible voters - more than twice what the Democrats ever did.
It gets worse. Imagine legislators ordering fences built to separate races in diverse neighborhoods, while leaving alone heavily black or heavily white areas. You'd call it a segregationist policy. That's exactly what GOP mapmakers did. Their new district lines split up only 4 percent of the 853 heavily black or white precincts across North Carolina, but the lines zigzag through and divide 40 percent of the 839 precincts that are 15 percent to 45 percent black, fostering voter confusion, ballot problems, disenfranchisement and segregation. Beyond shameful.
