Resources

See how Gerrymandering Works – Great 2-minute video

How do they do it??
This 2-minute video is the clearest explanation yet!

Dimes Draw the Map — From the new redistricting movie, Line in the Street. See it on Vimeo here.

Drawing the County Lines Fair Districts Webinar

When we think of gerrymandering, we tend to think about Congressional and legislative seats, but gerrymandering county commissions, municipal councils, and school boards is also a popular sport in North Carolina, with its own share of lawsuits and controversies! In 2021, these districts will be redrawn, so join us for a discussion of the issues surrounding local redistricting in our state and elsewhere. 70 minute video on Youtube.

Engaging citizens in map-drawing

Join us for a hands-on look at one of the new redistricting apps that put redistricting into the hands of us voters. We’ll look at Princeton’s Representable, one of the best of this new breed. Now redistricting is not just for wonks and computer geeks! Representable is designed to help community members define their “communities of interest,” geographic areas that share economic, cultural, or other ties and should be kept in together when districts are drawn. But these easy-to-use tools can do more than that: they can even be used to draw and submit complete districts, to crowdsource a whole map, or to suggest improvements to whatever the legislature comes up with.

County by County – The Forgotten 20 Year Court Battle for Racial Equity in Local NC Government

Events of the past year have brought well-deserved attention to the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and the tremendous sacrifices made to advance voting rights for all Americans. Now, as we work to restore the Voting Rights Act to its full power, we can take valuable lessons from the decades of struggle after the VRA was passed. Many battles still had to be fought in federal court to remove systemic barriers to racial justice in local and county elections, bringing lawsuits against discriminatory electoral systems city by city and county by county. Between 1984 and 2004, committed NC organizations, particularly the NAACP, as well as individual citizens and their legal teams, brought 67 VRA voting rights cases against city and county governments, winning most of them.

This month’s webinar will shine a light on this history and its lessons for our own times. We will review the record of VRA court battles brought at the local level assembled by Anita Earls (now Justice Earls) in a landmark 2008 report on North Carolina’s VRA cases.