Endorse the 5 Principles for

Reasonable Redistricting Reform

We need to reform redistricting in a way that:  1) ends extreme gerrymandering and 2) can win passage in the NC General Assembly. The most reasonable solution to this challenge is a citizens redistricting commission that keeps the legislature in the process.

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Help the League of Women Voters of NC show that North Carolinians want a fair and simple solution to end gerrymandering by endorsing the Five Principles for Reasonable Redistricting Reform using the form below. Over 2600 North Carolinians have already endorsed them. You can download and print endorsements for friends and neighbors to sign here.

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If your organization would like to endorse the 5 principles, you can use the same form, indicating in the comments that this is an organizational endorsement and that you are authorized to take that step. If you could like to discuss organizational endorsement, please contact us at www.FairDistrictsNC.org. Organizations that endorse the 5 principles are considered members of the coalition. There are no other obligations to be a member, but we welcome support and engagement in educating voters about fair maps. 

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In North Carolina, only the legislature can change how we draw our districts, either by adopting an ordinary law or a constitutional amendment to be ratified by the voters.  Using these five simple principles, we can design a citizens commission that would work well in our state but also keep the legislature in the process.  

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At present, the NC constitution provides very little guidance on how redistricting is to be done, beyond requiring that districts have equal population, be contiguous (all of one piece), and cross county lines as little as possible (keep counties whole).   We need to put a better system in place by 2021, when we will draw new maps for the Congress and the legislature based on the new 2020 Census data.  

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These five principles were developed through a study by North Carolina researchers who looked at 29 redistricting commissions in other states and 50 bills introduced in 15 state legislatures in 2017 to create a redistricting commission. The study's authors focused on bills introduced in Southern legislatures and other states that, like North Carolina, do not permit citizens to collect signatures to put legislation or a constitutional amendment on the ballot. They boiled down their findings to five simple principles representing a consensus approach that makes sense for our state.