Dan Way reports for Carolina Journal on the unanimous decision by a three-judge panel, which ruled that the new election maps drawn by Republicans following the 2010 U.S. Census are legal. So why did the Republicans get a unanimous ruling? Sen. Bob Rucho (R-Mecklenburg) explains that there’s no mystery to the recipe.
Rucho said Republicans “spent a lot of time” studying the decision in the state Supreme Court case Stephenson v. Bartlett in making certain they were complying with the state and U.S. constitutions and redistricting statutes in determining how to redraw the voting maps.
“You just follow the Stephenson decision, beginning with the Voting Rights Act, the whole-county division, making sure one person, one vote,” Rucho said.
“It’s a cookbook,” he said. “There is no other way of drawing the maps. Had the Democrats done what we did in following the law, they would have come out with the same [boundaries] primarily because of the fact that you just step by step it and that kind of delivers the maps that you need to have.”
And for those who wonder about partisanship in the decision, there is this fact: the panel consisted of two Democrats and 1 Republican.
