The Campaign Legal Center and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice filed a complaint today on behalf of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina and numerous individual voters, arguing that North Carolina’s 2016 congressional redistricting plan violates the 1st and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. League of Women Voters of North Carolina v. Rucho was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina. North Carolina’s 2016 redistricting plan was drafted during a special legislative session after a federal three-judge panel ruled that previous maps were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.
In 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court held that partisan gerrymandering claims present a legal controversy that courts could potentially resolve. However, to date, the court has not agreed on an acceptable standard to determine when a partisan gerrymander is unconstitutional.League of Women Voters of North Carolina v. Rucho offers an empirical analysis to demonstrate the extent to which an extreme gerrymander exists. That analysis is called theefficiency gap, which captures the packing and cracking among a plan’s districts in a single number. This is the first case since Whitford v. Gill in Wisconsin to present the efficiency gap as a legal standard to determine if a partisan gerrymander is too extreme.