North Carolina justices hand Republicans big win with election rulings

In massive victories for Republicans, the newly GOP-controlled North Carolina Supreme Court on Friday threw out a previous ruling against gerrymandered voting maps and upheld a photo voter identification law that colleagues had struck down as racially biased.

The partisan gerrymandering ruling should make it significantly easier for the state’s Republican-dominated Legislature to help the GOP gain seats in the narrowly divided U.S. House when state lawmakers redraw congressional boundaries for the 2024 election. Under the current map, Democrats won seven of the state’s 14 congressional seats last November.

The court, which became majority Republican this year with the election of two GOP justices, ruled after taking the unusual step of revisiting opinions made in December by the court’s previous iteration, when Democrats held four seats to Republicans’ three. The court held rehearings in March.

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Friday’s 5-2 rulings also mean that state lawmakers should have greater latitude in drawing General Assembly district boundaries over the next decade, and that a photo ID mandate approved by the GOP-controlled Legislature in late 2018 could be enforced in time for the 2024 election.

In another court decision made along party lines Friday, the justices overturned a trial court decision on when the voting rights of convicted felons can be restored. That means potentially tens of thousands of people convicted of felonies will have to keep waiting to complete their probation or parole or pay their fines to qualify to vote again.

Republican legislators celebrated the sweeping series of favorable decisions resulting from the new makeup of the state’s highest court. Outside groups spent millions on the two state Supreme Court campaigns in 2022. The remaining Democratic justices and their allies lambasted the decisions.

Chief Justice Paul Newby, writing the majority opinion in the redistricting case, said the previous Democratic majority erred in declaring that the state constitution outlawed extensive partisan gerrymandering. The court struck down maps last year that the General Assembly had drawn, saying they gave Republicans outsized electoral advantage compared with their voting power.

Newby said a partisan gerrymandering prohibition is absent from the plain language of the constitution.

Associate Justice Anita Earls, writing the dissenting opinion, said the court had correctly ruled last year to ensure all North Carolina residents “regardless of political party, were not denied their ‘fundamental right to vote on equal terms.’ ... Today, the majority strips the people of this right.”