North Carolina Republican lawmakers deny that they lied to a court during a racial gerrymandering case—and they’re trying to get voting rights lawyers punished for using evidence from the hard drives of deceased Republican gerrymandering expert Thomas Hofeller. The dispute came up in a whole other gerrymandering case (because North Carolina Republicans have been such prolific district-riggers), with Republican legislators embracing the view that the best defense is a good offense and expressing outrage over the “false and grossly inflated” suggestion that they lied, which they were further outraged reached the media “for the transparent purpose of scoring political points.”
What are North Carolina Republicans trying to convince us they didn’t lie about? It concerns Thomas Hofeller—architect, among other things, of the Trump administration’s census citizenship question—and his hard drives that were obtained by voting rights advocates. They found that, at the very same time a court was considering whether to hold a special election and hearing from the Republican-controlled North Carolina legislature that new maps hadn’t yet been drawn, Hofeller was in fact nearly done with those very same new maps. Oh, and there’s this: “Common Cause also alleged that Hofeller’s files showed that that he was using racial data to draw the replacement maps, despite the legislature’s representation in court that racial data had not been even uploaded to his computer.”
So the replacement maps that were supposedly not even started and not made using racial data and were in fact nearly done and definitely used racial data. The Republicans insist they were not lying because “There is a difference between a career map-drawer tinkering on a computer and a legislature deliberating over a redistricting plan with the intent of enacting one into law” and also because Hofeller had not been stupid enough to openly use the racial data on his work computer provided by the state.
At this point you’d think that North Carolina Republicans would have conclusively found doing enough shady, abusive stuff in their efforts to gerrymander the state that they would just issue a blanket admission: “Yeah, we did it all, obviously, and you know what? We’d do it again.” Yet somehow they keep trying to play the outrage card.