If the redistricting public hearing at Western Carolina University Tuesday night was a shirts-and-skins pick-up game (shirts being mask-wearers), shirts outnumbered the skins by about 110 to 10. Mask-wearers were not exclusively left-leaning, but most public comments offered to a panel of mostly Republican North Carolina legislators leaned that way.
Republicans retain control of the legislature and redistricting in 2021, a process over which Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, has no veto. Public hearings being held in each of 13 existing congressional districts (a 14th will be added this year) are pro forma. Everyone knows that. It did not prevent over one hundred from driving some distance to give legislators advice or a piece of their minds. Even if Republicans have already made up theirs.
The first speaker of afternoon, Jake Quinn of Asheville (a personal friend), challenged state legislators to draw districts this time that will not immediately draw legal challenges. The state and voting rights groups spent the last ten years litigating the Republican maps drawn in 2011 and redrawn under court order multiple times over the decade.
“Exorcise the ghost of Thomas Hofeller,” Quinn said.
“Doggone it, we wouldn’t need a meeting like this if the process was fair,” said another man from Buncombe County over an hour to the east.
The legal costs and voting turmoil of last 10 years of legal fights were on many minds. As was the prospect for having counties split to satisfy the partisan impulse for gerrymandering districts again with “surgical precision.” Speakers demanded fairness, transparency, and an opportunity to provide input after draft maps are finally released. As of now, the public can only comment in the dark. Several called for nonpartisan redistricting commission.
Speakers complained that the hearings were too few, too hard to get to, and neither streamed online nor translated into Spanish:
Sergio Fernandez said he drove an hour and 40 minutes to attend the public hearing. Fernandez, executive director of the Latino Advocacy Coalition out of Henderson County, offered to attend, livestream and translate into Spanish the rest of the planned public hearings.
“We’ll be there. It’s a plan,” Fernandez said. “It’s my job as a community leader to help our community understand what’s going on.”
The panel displayed a distinct lack of diversity, Fernandez added. While Henerson County has a growing Latino population, NC-11, now represented by Republican Madison Cawthorn, is overall very, very white, even including the reservation of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee. Statewide, however, Latinos make up over one million of the state’s 10 million residents, Fernandez said, and are likely undercounted in the new census.
Of the few speakers not obviously left-leaning, one man found it “unconscionable” that districts would be drawn using a census that excluded distinguishing betwen citizens and noncitizens. This means large counties would be overcounted, he argued without citing evidence or awareness that noncitizens reside in rural areas as well as urban.
This was the second time since the pandemic hit that I’ve been in a large roomful of people (with masks). Now we wait, hoping not to incubate.