Oct. 11, 2021 – Last week, the NC General Assembly Committee on Redistricting announced the process for drawing maps, which will take place over the next two weeks. The maps they draw and finally approve will determine how the state population will be divided up for voting during the next 10 years. 
 
For the state House and Senate seats, the process begins with developing county clusters of groupings, which will make up the required number of people per seats. For the House, that number is 86,995; and for the Senate the number is 208,788. Deviation cannot exceed 5% for state seats. 
 
The Committee has published cluster maps as the basis for further drawing. View them here: Senate and House.
 
Map drawing for the 14 Congressional districts does not begin with clusters. The NCGA Committee has said almost nothing about how they will draw these; however, we know that this process has also begun. 
 
You Can Help!  
The public can observe the map-drawing process taking place in the Legislative Office Building in Raleigh (300 N. Salisbury St, Raleigh, NC 27603). House drawing is in Room 643. Senate drawing is in Room 544.  
 
You can also watch live streams from home. This link goes directly to a page that shows the screens. There are four for the Senate and two for the House.  
 
Why watching livestream or in-person is important: 
This is our only opportunity actually to see what they are doing. At some point, the maps that will be approved for state Senate, for state House, and for Congressional districts will be entered into one of the computers – the three maps will become law. 
 
If these maps do harm to our communities, we cannot be seen to “sit on our rights.” We have to speak up as soon as the harm becomes evident. 

Here are some pointers for observing: 

• Keep notes of when you observe – date and time of day.
• Note who is doing the map drawing, and whether you can tell if someone is working with that person (keep physical description if you can see that person) – date and time are important as they indicate when "the map" is actually entered and by whom. 
• Comment if the person or a companion is referring to notes or papers.
• Send your notes periodically to the chair of your local Redistricting Committee. If you do not have a redistricting committee, you can send your notes to Phyllis Demko, LWVNC, demko [at] lwvnc.org.  
• Take a screen shot, preferably with date/time stamp, and include that in your notes.  
• You can respond through the portal to anything disturbing. Unless you have cleared it with your president, please respond as an individual – not on behalf of the League.  

Here is the public portal for comments to the Committee. 

On behalf of the State League board and the Redistricting LAT, thank you for helping in this important task. We must monitor what the General Assembly is doing and call out actions that could harm our communities.