North Carolina was drawing up
new congressional districts. They drew up some districts (notably the 12th)
that were predominantly African-American.
North Carolina argued that
the districts were gerrymandered in order to create a district that would
be more likely to vote for a Democrat.
Gerrymandering is a
political trick to disenfranchise the minority political party. It
works like this:
Say a State voted 50%
Republican and 50% Democrat. A Republican legislator could
'gerrymander' and make 10 congressional districts that were 55%
Republican, and 45% Democrat, and 1 district that was almost all
Democrat. That way the Republicans would win 10 House seats and the
Democrats only 1, despite that fact that the State was evenly split
demographically.
Cromartie sued, claiming that
the gerrymandering violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Cromartie claimed that
factoring racial demographics into drawing up congressional districts was
not constitutional.
In the past, districts had
been drawn with the express purpose of disenfranchising minorities as
much as possible.
The US Supreme Court found
that the gerrymandering was constitutional.
The US Supreme Court found
that the strangely-shaped districts were drawn based on voting behavior,
not on racial characteristics.
The Court considered it a
coincidence that most of the Democratic voters in North Carolina
happened to be minorities.
"In a case such as
this where majority-minority districts are at issue and where racial
identification correlates highly with political affiliation, the party
attacking the legislatively drawn boundaries must show at the least
that there legislature could have achieved its legitimate political
objectives in alternative ways that are comparably consistent with
traditional districting principles.
It is ok under the Equal
Protection Clause to discriminate
based on political affiliation.
