Danielle Lang

The court eloquently explains why partisan gerrymandering cannot be reconciled with a democracy: It writes that partisan gerrymandering "amounts to a legislative efforts to give some voters a greater voice in choosing."

But our founding fathers believed it was "essential" that our Congressional reps "derive [their] powers from the great body of society, not from ... a favored class of it." In other words, in a democracy, every vote has to count equally.

And the court hits the nail on the head here: "A legislature that is itself insulated by virtue of an invidious gerrymander can enact add'l legislation to restrict voting rights & thereby further cement its unjustified control" (p.50)

That is PRECISELY what has happened in North Carolina.

To provide a sense of the sheer size of the bias in this map: expert testimony shows that when computers simulated thousands of draft plans, they most often predicted 7 or 6 R congressional seats. #fairmaps

The challenged map predicted (and actually delivered) 10 R congressional seats. That happened in less than 0.7% of the simulated maps. This was no accident and the skew is several congressional seats.

In another expert analysis of a 1,000 simulated maps, the 10-3 map in favor of Rs occurred exactly ZERO times.

Another tidbit: Republicans currently hold 76.9% of the congressional seats for North Carolina whereas NC voters case only 53.22% of their votes for Republican congressional candidates. That math just doesn't add up to democracy.