Special elections: Will North Carolina hold legislative elections early?

The Supreme Court of the United States has spoken, and North Carolina will have to redraw its voting districts for the state House and Senate.

The justices upheld a lower court ruling that said the way the districts were drawn by the Republican-controlled chambers put too many black voters in some districts in order to minimize their impact on the outcome of elections.

We have spoken of the irony of the situation before -- Democratic lawyers engineered the first racial gerrymandering 30 years ago -- and won't go there again.

But the question now confronting lawmakers is whether the state needs to hold special elections this fall -- in the middle of an election cycle -- in order to meet the court's demands.

That's asking a lot of the state's voters.

Political experts say it wouldn't be impossible to pull off, but we aren't thinking about the lawyers and mapmakers, we're thinking about the voters. It doesn't seem fair to ask them to suffer through all that campaigning a year early.

Published in Editorials on June 6, 2017 9:49 PM