A federal judge upheld North Carolina’s Senate map Tuesday, rejecting claims that Republican lawmakers had illegally drawn the districts to dilute the voting power of Black voters.
Challengers to the map argued that it split up Black communities in the northeastern part of the state, but U.S. District Judge James C. Dever III, an appointee of President George W. Bush, ruled that this did not rise to a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
He further wrote that he declined to direct the legislature to “engage in the odious practice of sorting voters by race in order to create a majority-Black Senate district.” In his 126-page ruling, Dever wrote that key experts presented by plaintiffs were not credible and said that given the “paucity of contemporary evidence of intentional discrimination concerning the right to vote against Black voters, the court gives plaintiff’s evidence little weight.”
“It is not 1965 or 1982 in North Carolina. It is 2025,” Dever later wrote. “… Plaintiffs ignore the progress that North Carolina has made over the past 60 years and seek to use (the Voting Rights Act) to sort voters by race in order to squeeze one more Democratic Senate district into the map.”