NC Democrats drop gerrymandering suit following SCOTUS ruling on Voting Rights Act
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- Rep. Rodney Pierce and a co-plaintiff voluntarily dropped a gerrymandering lawsuit Monday.
- Pierce had argued the state Senate map diluted the voting power of Black residents.
- Federal judge ruled against Pierce last fall, and the appeal is now dropped.
North Carolina Democrats dropped a gerrymandering lawsuit challenging the state’s Republican-drawn state Senate map following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to weaken the Voting Rights Act.
Rep. Rodney Pierce, of Halifax County, and another plaintiff filed notice Monday that they were voluntarily dismissing their lawsuit, which had accused the legislature of diluting the voting power of Black residents in the northeastern part of the state.
“The Supreme Court effectively made the (Voting Rights Act) a meaningless law with no teeth,” Pierce said in a statement. “Because of that decision, there is no longer a path open to us to protect the voting rights of Black citizens in my part of the state, so we have dismissed the suit.”
Last month, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority struck down Louisiana’s congressional map as a racial gerrymander due to its creation of a second majority-Black district.
While the ruling did not explicitly gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which has been interpreted to require the creation of majority-minority districts in certain circumstances, Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent wrote that the section was now “all but a dead letter.”
Since the ruling, more Republican-led states, like Tennessee, have rushed to draw new congressional maps that eliminate Democrat-leaning majority-minority districts.
Pierce’s lawsuit had not challenged North Carolina’s congressional map, but rather the redistricting plan for the state Senate, which was approved in 2023.
Last fall, a federal judge ruled against Pierce, writing that he declined to direct the legislature to “engage in the odious practice of sorting voters by race in order to create a majority-Black Senate district.”
Pierce had appealed that ruling to the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, but has now opted to abandon the case.
