NYT:

A North Carolina court rejected a Republican-drawn map of the state’s 14 congressional districts on Wednesday and substituted its own version, the second time in less than two weeks that a court in the state has invalidated a Republican House map as unconstitutionally partisan.

The new map, drawn by a nonpartisan panel of four redistricting experts, appeared to split North Carolina’s congressional districts roughly equally between Republicans and Democrats, in a state where voters are divided evenly along partisan lines. It gives each party six relatively safe House seats and makes the remaining two winnable by either side.

The Republican-drawn map that was rejected would have awarded the G.O.P. six safe seats and Democrats four, leaving the remaining four as tossups.

Voting-rights advocacy groups and Democrats had argued to block the latest Republican map, saying it unlawfully favored Republicans. A three-judge panel of the state Superior Court in Raleigh agreed. It ruled Wednesday that the latest map failed to meet the standards for fairness set out by the State Supreme Court on Feb. 4, when that court invalidated the original map drawn by the Republican-controlled State Legislature.

In the Feb. 4 ruling, the State Supreme Court said that Republican maps of congressional districts and State Legislature seats violated a host of provisions in the State Constitution that guarantee freedom of speech, free elections and equal protection. Any valid map, the justices said, would have to satisfy “some combination” of five statistical measures of partisan fairness developed by political scientists in recent decades.

On Wednesday, the Raleigh court did approve a Republican-drawn map of the State House, which all sides in the redistricting lawsuit had supported, and a new Republican map of the State Senate, which plaintiffs in the suit had opposed.

Both sides said they would appeal aspects of the Superior Court decision to the State Supreme Court. Tom Moore, the speaker of the State House, called the rejection of the Republican map “nothing short of egregious,” and Republicans asked the state’s top court to stay the use of the new map for now. The plaintiffs — Common Cause, the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters and a group of Democratic voters in the state — all appealed the approvals of either the State House or State Senate maps, or both.