The General Assembly’s mad scramble last month to redraw nearly half of the state’s House and Senate districts under a tight court deadline appears to have produced something new for North Carolina – fair maps.
That’s according to a new analysis by WRAL News, which used a technique developed by Duke University mathematicians to compare the performance of the newly proposed districts to thousands of computer-generated potential maps. The new maps still show more Republicans elected statewide. But the proposed districts would likely mean more Democratic wins than previous maps, which a three-court panel of judges ruled unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders just last month.
Yet Democrats still aren’t completely happy with the latest round of mapmaking, which they say carried forward inherent bias from previous iterations and didn’t go far enough to improve the redistricting process.