News and Observer:

A federal judge upheld North Carolina’s Senate map Tuesday, rejecting claims that Republican lawmakers had illegally drawn the districts to dilute the voting power of Black voters.

Challengers to the map argued that it split up Black communities in the northeastern part of the state, but U.S. District Judge James C. Dever III, an appointee of President George W. Bush, ruled that this did not rise to a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

He further wrote that he declined to direct the legislature to “engage in the odious practice of sorting voters by race in order to create a majority-Black Senate district.” In his 126-page ruling , Dever wrote that key experts presented by plaintiffs were not credible and said that given the “paucity of contemporary evidence of inte

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