By Jordan Meadows
Staff Writer
North Carolina Democrats have abandoned a high-profile federal lawsuit challenging the state’s Republican-drawn Senate map.
State Rep. Rodney Pierce of Halifax County and co-plaintiff Moses Matthews, a voting rights advocate, filed a stipulation of dismissal last Monday with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, formally ending their appeal of a lower court ruling that upheld the contested districts.
The lawsuit, originally filed in 2023, alleged that North Carolina’s Senate map unlawfully diluted the voting power of Black residents in the northeastern part of the state by “cracking” the historically Black “Black Belt” region across multiple districts. According to the plaintiffs, the map split this contiguous community into Senate Districts 1 and 2, leaving each with only about 30% Black voting-age population and limiting the ability of Black voters to elect candidates of their choice.
However, Pierce said the recent Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais effectively foreclosed any path forward. The 6–3 ruling by the Court’s conservative majority placed new limits on how Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act can be used in redistricting cases, emphasizing the need to prove intentional discrimination rather than disparate impact.
“The Supreme Court effectively made the Voting Rights Act a meaningless law with no teeth,” Pierce said in a statement announcing the dismissal. “Because of that decision, there is no longer a path open to us to protect the voting rights of Black citizens in my part of the state, so we have dismissed the suit. It’s a sad day for our democracy.”
In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan warned that the racial provision is now “all but a dead letter,” raising concerns among voting rights advocates that minority representation could decline nationwide.
The dismissal in North Carolina comes “with prejudice,” meaning the case cannot be refiled. As part of the agreement, Pierce and Matthews will pay an agreed-upon portion of legal costs to Republican legislative leaders, though the State Board of Elections will not seek fees. The move leaves Senate Districts 1 and 2 intact with no remaining federal legal challenges; both districts were already used in the 2024 elections and will continue to be used in upcoming contests.
In September, U.S. District Judge James Dever rejected the plaintiffs’ claims after a five-day trial, concluding they had failed to prove a violation of Section 2. In a lengthy opinion, Dever wrote that courts should not require lawmakers to engage in “the odious practice of sorting voters based on race” to create majority-Black districts. He also found that Black voters in the region had demonstrated an ability to elect candidates of their choice without constituting a majority in a single district.
Republican legislative leaders defended the map throughout the case, arguing that courts have consistently rejected similar claims in northeastern North Carolina. In court filings, their attorneys said that creating majority-Black districts in the region would conflict with the state constitution’s county-grouping rules and trigger strict constitutional scrutiny.
They also challenged the plaintiffs’ evidence, asserting that racial bloc voting was not strong enough to justify race-based districting and that demographic data did not support an additional majority-Black district.
Plaintiffs, however, pointed to decades of precedent stemming from the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Thornburg v. Gingles, which established the framework for evaluating racial vote dilution claims. Their attorneys argued that for nearly 40 years, Black voters in the region had successfully elected preferred candidates under maps that respected those principles, and that the 2023 redistricting plan marked a sharp departure by dispersing those voters across multiple districts.
The 4th Circuit had already declined to block the districts before the 2024 election and denied an earlier request to have the full court hear the case, instead allowing a standard three-judge panel to handle the appeal. With the voluntary dismissal, that appeal will no longer proceed.
An analysis of federal court records shows at least 17 ongoing legal challenges to state and local voting maps that must now contend with the higher legal standard. Many of these cases are concentrated in the South, where voting patterns are often racially polarized, but similar disputes involving Latino and Native American voters have also emerged in states like Washington, Pennsylvania, and North Dakota.
