North Carolina: Questions abound after judges invalidate 2 congressional districts | The Charlotte Observer

The day after a panel of federal judges invalidated two of North Carolina’s 13 congressional districts, state elections officials were working on a Saturday afternoon to encourage voters with absentee ballots to vote the full ballot anyway. Kim Strach, executive director of the N.C. Board of Elections, and Josh Lawson, general counsel for the board, said Saturday that they did not want voters who received the 8,611 absentee ballots sent out for the March 15 primary elections to lose an opportunity to vote. “The number one message we want to get out is we want voters to continue voting,” Strach said Saturday afternoon. Late on Friday, a three-judge panel ruled that North Carolina’s 1st and 12th congressional districts were racial gerrymanders and ordered them redrawn by Feb. 19. Though the ruling halts elections in those districts until new maps are approved, questions remained on Saturday about what that would mean for other congressional races on the primary ballots.
Gerry Cohen, a former legislative staffer who worked on redistricting plans from 1981 to 2011, said Saturday that a range of possibilities existed for what could happen in North Carolina.
Several times over the past three decades, primary elections were delayed either in whole or in part for district maps that had to be redrawn. Primary elections for races not affected by the congressional maps could go ahead, Cohen said, and the congressional elections delayed until new lines were approved.
There also was at least one time, Cohen said, in which elections were held for maps ultimately deemed to be unconstitutional. “We’ve had a number of times where the state has lost a case that we’ve had to postpone primaries,” Cohen said. What is different this time, Cohen said, is that voting by absentee ballots has already started.
 
Full Article: Questions abound after judges invalidate 2 NC congressional districts | The Charlotte Observer.