Deceased Strategist’s Files Detail Republican Gerrymandering in North Carolina, Advocates Say
By Michael Wines
June 6, 2019
When the hard drives of a deceased Republican strategist revealed new evidence last week about the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, many people wondered whether the files hid other revelations.
On Thursday, in a county court in Raleigh, N.C., they got an answer: there is potentially much more.
The late strategist, Thomas Hofeller, was the mastermind behind the G.O.P.’s gerrymandering strategy, and left behind four hard drives and 18 thumb drives containing more than 75,000 files that were found by his estranged daughter after his death in August.
The advocacy group Common Cause said in court documents submitted in Raleigh on Thursday that the Hofeller files include new evidence showing how North Carolina Republicans misled a federal court to prolong the life of their map of state legislative districts, which had been ruled unconstitutional.
The Republicans told the federal court hearing the map case that they would not be able to draw new legislative districts and hold public hearings on them in time for a proposed special election in late 2017 or early 2018. In fact, Common Cause said, Mr. Hofeller’s files show that almost all the work was already done: proposed new boundaries had been drawn for more than 97 percent of the state’s proposed Senate districts and 90 percent of House districts.
The federal court’s decision not to call a special election left the existing legislative gerrymander — and a veto-proof Republican majority in both the state House and Senate — in place for roughly an additional year.
The new evidence about the actions of the Republicans in North Carolina “raises serious questions about the legitimacy of their hold on power in the state,” said Eric Holder, an attorney general in the Obama administration who now heads the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. The committee’s nonprofit arm has financed the Common Cause lawsuit. “They should now explain to the court — and the people of North Carolina — why they are so intent on manipulating the election process for their own benefit,” Mr. Holder said in a written statement.
A senior Republican legislator who was involved in the redistricting, Representative David R. Lewis, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In an earlier filing in the case in Raleigh, lawyers for Mr. Lewis and other legislative leaders argued that the maps cited by Common Cause could have been work Mr. Hofeller had done as a paid adviser in the lawsuit — or, they said, he might simply have drawn them out of personal interest in his spare time.
The latest evidence presages what could be a furious battle involving voting-rights advocates, the two national parties, and even Mr. Hofeller’s heirs, over whether any other secrets on the storage drives will ever see the light of day.
The court filing by Common Cause on Thursday included a letter sent by lawyers for Republican legislative leaders, demanding that lawyers for Common Cause return Mr. Hofeller’s hard drives to his estate and destroy any information that had been copied from them. The demand was issued one day after documents from the Hofeller files surfaced in the litigation over the census citizenship question.
Stephanie Hofeller, the strategist’s daughter, said in a telephone interview that since then, she had come under pressure from allies of her father to keep the remaining content of the hard drives private. She declined to elaborate, beyond saying that the disclosure of the census-related documents had upset them.
She said the pressure had only stiffened her resolve. “They’ve underestimated me,” she said.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/us/north-carolina-gerrymander-republican.html
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