Mark Joseph Stern for Slate:

There are sure to be more revelations from the Hofeller files to come, driving home the downside of using a single consultant to mastermind redistricting across multiple states and decades.

For years, Hofeller held an office at the Republican National Committee on Capitol Hill. He worked as both its official redistricting director and, later, as a paid consultant. He traveled the country to teach Republican lawmakers how to gerrymander their districts to create permanent GOP legislative majorities. (Ironically, he incorporated warningsabout keeping all of this work under wraps, like “Make sure your security is real,” “Make sure your computer is in a PRIVATE location,” and “The ‘e’ in email stands for ‘eternal.’ ”) Hofeller also personally helped to draw some of the country’s most egregiously gerrymandered maps, including those in Alabama, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia. (He likely had a hand in more maps than we currently know.) But Hofeller devoted the most time to North Carolina, where he created lopsided Republican majorities in a state evenly divided between the parties.

Following the 2010 red wave, Hofeller worked with the RNC to develop Project REDMAP, a sweeping initiative to help GOP-controlled state houses build durable gerrymanders. He taught lawmakers how to use racial and partisan data to dilute Democratic votes. His maps preserved Republicans’ House majority over the next three elections and maintained GOP domination over most state legislatures.
Now Hofeller’s records are in the hands of attorneys for Common Cause, the voting rights group suing to invalidate North Carolina’s Hofeller-designed legislative gerrymander. The firm representing Common Cause, Arnold & Porter, also represents plaintiffs fighting the citizenship question—which is how Hofeller’s white voting power memo wound up before the judge overseeing the census case. (On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union also brought it to the Supreme Court’s attention.)

The voting rights advocates in possession of the Hofeller collection have not yet revealed the full extent of the files. This may be because they have been exceedingly careful to play by the rules: Lizon offered her father’s drives to Common Cause directly, but its attorneys decided to issue a subpoena in February to obtain them formally and provide notice to third parties.