Court hands down a stunningly aggressive attack on illegal gerrymandering
Last edited Tue Feb 26, 2019, 06:12 PM - Edit history (1)
People who steal elections should not be rewarded for their theft.
Ian Millhiser
Feb 25, 2019, 11:36 am
A perennial problem in gerrymandering cases is that, even when an illegal map is eventually struck down by the courts, the state will often administer one or more elections using the deficient map before the courts can intervene.
That effectively means illegally elected lawmakers will make new laws — sometimes for years. It also means partisans have little incentive not to gerrymander, because their illegal maps are likely to be in effect for at least one election.
On Friday, a North Carolina state court offered a radical and creative solution to this problem, invalidating two state constitutional amendments that were proposed by an illegally gerrymandered legislature after the state’s legislative maps were invalidated — but before a new election could remove lawmakers in gerrymandered seats from office.
The case is North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v. Moore.
Under the North Carolina Constitution, the state legislature may propose constitutional amendments with a 3/5s supermajority vote in both chambers. Such proposed amendments must then be ratified by a majority of the voters.
And lets not forget that this is the same state and the majority party in the legislature, that was backing a Congressional candidate, that was trying to get elected by stuffing the ballots with a criminal enterprise until he got caught, and it is the same party that is always yelling about voter fraud................................
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