Republican-friendly judicial districts advance in House

RALEIGH – The state House has approved a measure that would give Republican candidates a leg up in races for most judges' seats in Buncombe County, but the Senate did not consider the idea during a two-day special session of the legislature.

The bill passed the House on a 69-43 vote Thursday night that went almost entirely along party lines. Approval came after the House rejected a move by Rep. Susan Fisher, D-Buncombe, to prevent the division of Buncombe County into two judicial districts.

District lines in the bill would make Republican candidates favorites for five of Buncombe's nine judge's seats despite the county's generally Democratic leanings.

The bill was one of several issues the legislature acted on Wednesday and Thursday. Senate leaders have said they are looking at moving to a system whereby judges would be appointed to the bench and the Senate had already left town by the time the House took up the judicial redistricting bill. 

Bill sponsor Rep. Justin Burr, R-Stanly, told the House the bill would make "long overdue and desperately needed reforms" by better aligning judicial districts with the population of different areas and judges' workloads.

He said the General Assembly has made no systematic realignment of the districts since the 1960s.

Democrats said the revision pushed by Burr and other legislative Republicans is just an effort to elect more GOP judges and will harm the operations of the court system.

"This is really a gerrymandering bill," said Democratic Rep. Marcia Morey, a former chief District Court judge from Durham County.

She noted a move this spring by the legislature to change the method of electing judges from nonpartisan to partisan races, saying no other state had taken that step since 1921.

The redistricting bill is "one of many steps to make our judges no longer an independent judicial body. ... We're turning them into politicians. We're removing the black robes and next year replacing them with blue and red robes," Morey said.

Buncombe County's two Superior Court judges and seven District Court judges are now elected in a countywide vote and all are Democrats. Burr's bill would create a heavily Democratic district containing most of Asheville and the Swannanoa Valley that would elect one Superior Court judge and three District Court judges.

The other district would take in the rest of the county, more narrowly favor Republican candidates and pick one Superior Court and four District Court judges.

A change made in committee Wednesday would move three precincts in the Weaverville area from the Republican-leaning district to the Democratic one.

That would allow two incumbent District Court judges, Susan Dotson-Smith and Andrea Dray, to avoid having to run against fellow Democratic judges if they want to stay on the bench as a previous version of the bill would have required.

The change would also make the Republican district a little more favorable to GOP candidates and widen the population disparity between the two districts.

The Democratic district would have 125,282 residents and pick three District Court judges while the Republican district would have 113,036 residents and choose four.

Fisher told the House there is no need to have two districts in Buncombe, saying judges serving the county are geographically and racially diverse today.

She also noted that Burr's bill would leave Gaston County, which had a population of about 32,000 people fewer than Buncombe's in 2010, in one judicial district. Both counties would have the same number of District Court judges.

That arrangement favors the election of GOP judges in Gaston because the county as a whole tends to vote Republican.

"There's no need to divide (Buncombe) in two. ... Its population is similar to Gaston and Gaston was left whole," she told the House.

Burr said bill backers "aim to establish a consistent policy across all urban counties" of dividing them into districts and Fisher's amendment would violate that.

Having districts in the largest counties "will allow for better opportunities for votes to get to know their judicial candidates," he said.

Fisher's amendment was voted down 45-65 in a mostly party-line vote.

Legislators limit AG, eliminate primaries for judges

On other issues considered in this week's special session of the state General Assembly, GOP leaders pushed through bill to eliminate party primaries in judicial elections next year and a budget cleanup measure that further attempted to limit Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein.

Stein had earlier this year been ordered by Republicans to locate $10 million in cuts and step he said will reduce his office's ability to oppose appeals of convictions in criminal cases. Democrats argued the cuts were politically motivated and an obstacle for him to carry out his duties.

A provision in a bill that passed this week making changes to the budget prevents Stein from delegating to local district attorneys the job of representing the state in criminal appeals.

Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper must decide within 10 days whether the budget and elections bills deserve vetoes.

He's already issued 12 of them during his first nine months as governor. Eight had been overridden before Thursday, and legislators completed No. 9 before going home by affirming as state law a wide-ranging regulatory bill that Cooper said would make it harder for government to protect water quality.

GOP lawmakers also found a way Thursday to bypass his July veto of a bill that allowed local governments in an urban county to stop posting legal notices in newspapers and put them on government websites instead.

Legislators used parliamentary maneuvering to break the bill into two parts, and the portion addressing Guilford County notices was not subject to the governor's veto stamp. Although the Senate passed the Guilford measure by a comfortable margin, the House barely approved it 58-57, as several Republicans remained worried about the precedent and how it could affect newspapers that rely on advertising revenue for the notices. The Guilford bill is now law.

Republican legislators had the proposed judicial maps in mind earlier Thursday when they gave final approval to a separate elections bill that would eliminate primaries for all court races in 2018 only and delay candidate filing for those races from February until late June.

GOP leaders say not having primaries for judges in 2018 would give lawmakers more time to fashion new judicial election districts and avoid having to reset candidate filing. Senate Republicans also have linked any district changes to a possible overhaul of how judges — currently elected by voters — are chosen in North Carolina.

The bill "shows we are serious about judicial redistricting," said Rep. David Lewis, a Harnett County Republican, on the House floor.

Democrats questioned the motivation for the delay, suggesting a GOP partisan advantage in appeals court races not affected by redistricting. They said the lack of judicial primaries will mean free-for-all elections and voters having little or no information about the candidates.

The winner is "going to be the luck of the draw ... or maybe it will be the best sounding name," said Rep. Darren Jackson of Wake County, the House minority leader.

The judicial primary cancellation was attached to a bill that would permanently reduce requirements for unaffiliated candidates to run in state and local elections and for political parties to field candidates up and down the ballot. The bill also would permanently lower the threshold a leading candidate would need to meet in order to avoid a primary runoff. The candidate would need to receive more than 30 percent of the votes cast, down from 40 percent.

Ten states require the leading candidate in a primary election to receive a certain percentage of the vote or face a runoff, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. North Carolina's threshold was reduced from a majority to 40 percent in 1989.

--The Associated Press