North Carolina May Be Ground Zero for Election Law Battles

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The purest distillation of the nation’s wars over voting rules and legislative gerrymandering is playing out in North Carolina.

A high-profile lawsuit is taking on a voter identification law and other voting changes. There are four other suits challenging North Carolina’s congressional or state legislative districts on racial grounds. Three more allege unconstitutional gerrymandering of local races. And on March 4, a new law changing how judges are elected was struck down by a three-judge state panel.

When voters go to the polls for the North Carolina primaries on Tuesday, any votes for congressional candidates will not count because a federal panel threw out the state’s congressional map in February. A separate congressional primary will be held on June 7.

States around the nation are embroiled in legal battles over voting requirements, district lines and the rules governing elections. But North Carolina feels like ground zero. It is a place where hyper partisanship, the focus on voting rules after the disputed election of President George W. Bush in 2000 and the Supreme Court’s dismantling of a crucial section of the Voting Rights Act have created an incessant state of combat over the way elections are conducted.

“It’s not a pretty time for democracy in North Carolina,” said Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, a nonpartisan government watchdog group.

North Carolina is the rare swing state in the South where Democrats and Republicans are evenly matched, and where major elections are often settled by precious handfuls of votes. Nonetheless, under the 2011 maps drawn by the legislature, Republicans control 10 of the 13 congressional seats. It is also a state where the memory of Jim Crow lingers — literacy tests were administered to voters here until the 1970s — and where Democrats lost control of both houses of the General Assembly in 2010 for the first time in more than a century.

Now, almost everything about voting in North Carolina can seem as though it is up for grabs.