Democrat Elmer Floyd accuses Democrats of rigging the election against him. Is he correct?

Democratic former state Rep. Elmer Floyd of Fayetteville is accusing his fellow Democrats of gerrymandering him into the Spring Lake-anchored District 42 served by Rep. Marvin Lucas.

Floyd alleges the Democrats persuaded the Republican-majority state House Redistricting Committee to amend the legislative district maps for the upcoming elections because they wanted to prevent Floyd from challenging freshman District 44 Rep. Charles Smith in the 2024 Democratic primary.

“Charles Smith pushed it through,” Floyd said Monday.

Smith said Monday he had no influence on how the map was changed.

“It was nothing that I requested,” Smith said. He said he did not seek to change the map to avoid running against Floyd: “No. Not at all.”

Floyd feels targeted by Democrats, he said, who are unhappy with some of his voting history with the Republican majorities in the House through the years. This includes Floyd’s votes with Republicans on the state budget, he said, on the state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, and on the controversial House Bill 2 “bathroom bill” of 2015, which regulated which bathrooms transgender people were allowed to use.

The map was changed at the behest of Lucas. He said he asked to have one of the voting precincts in District 44 moved into District 42. But the change that was made went farther south than Lucas asked for. He said he did not want to take in the neighboring precinct where Floyd lives.

“I had nothing to do with that,” Lucas said Monday.

No one has publicly explained why it happened.

Meanwhile, Lucas has not decided whether he will run for reelection in 2024, he said.

Mapmakers can steer election outcomes

Gerrymandering is the political practice of intentionally drawing an election district to help or hurt certain groups, political parties or individual candidates in future elections. This form of rigging an election is allowed under the state and federal constitutions if the motive is political, courts have ruled.

In this instance, Floyd is accusing the mapmakers of shifting the boundary between District 42 and District 44 to put his home into District 42. Candidates are required to live in the districts in which they run.

Floyd prefers to run in Fayetteville-centered District 44, which has much of the area and many of the people he represented from 2009 through 2020 when he lost the Democratic primary.

It would be challenging for Floyd to run against Lucas in the primary for Spring Lake-based District 42. Lucas has served the Spring Lake community for decades, with tenure as mayor before he went to the General Assembly.

Democrats who complain that the Republicans have gerrymandered for political gain with these new maps are ignoring their history, Floyd said.

“Democrats is the one that taught Republicans how to do this redistricting, how to gerrymander,” Floyd said. “So we haven’t forgot our old skills that we taught someone else. How to do it neatly.”

What Marvin Lucas wanted

When the Republican-controlled legislature on Oct. 18 unveiled proposed state House district maps for the 2024 to 2030 elections, Floyd’s home was in the proposed District 44.

But then, during a House Redistricting Committee meeting on Oct. 23, Democratic state Rep. Zack Hawkins of Durham asked the GOP-majority committee to change the map for Cumberland County. Hawkins said this was agreed to by the county’s three Democratic lawmakers in the House: Lucas, Smith and Frances Jackson of Hope Mills.

The committee approved the request 17-0, and the revised map became law two days later on Oct. 25 when the legislature made its final votes on it.

Lucas said Monday he had submitted his request to adjust the District 42 boundaries because he wanted District 42 to have the Cross Creek 9 voting precinct in Fayetteville.

“I did request that Precinct 9 be in my district, because … it’s one of the closest precincts to my district,” Lucas said. Years ago, under a previous election map, he said, the Cross Creek 9 precinct was in his district.

Cross Creek 9 runs in a north-south direction between Rose Hill Road, McArthur Road and Ramsey Street, tapering off on the southern end at the Lafayette Memorial Park cemetery.

Just south of Cross Creek 9 is the Cross Creek 5 voting precinct where Floyd lives.

Lucas said he had no intention of his request taking in Floyd’s precinct.

Hawkins, the Democratic lawmaker who advanced the change in the House Redistricting Committee, could not be reached for comment as to why the new map went beyond what Lucas asked for.

Rules for making maps

The United States Constitution requires each district to have about the same number of residents. The ideal population of each state House district is 86,995, according to the 2020 United States census. The map-making lawmakers keep the districts within 5% of that figure.

The 5% fudge factor is plus-or-minus 4,350 people.

The lawmakers also strive to avoid splitting voting precincts between two legislative districts. This helps keep together communities of common interests. But it makes it harder to draw districts of equal size because precincts can widely vary in population.

Squeezing the Cumberland County balloon

So what happened?

The addition of Floyd’s precinct to District 42 may have been a question of math.

In order to put the Cross Creek 9 precinct into District 42, the mapmaker also had to add the Westarea 1 precinct, which is in between Cross Creek 9 and the original boundary of District 42.

The two precincts combined added 9,871 residents to District 42, bringing it to 92,637. That’s 5,642 above the ideal population and 1,292 above the permissible 5% variance.

At the same time, District 44 was suddenly 13,594 people under the ideal size, and 9,244 short of the minimum allowed by the fudge factor.

Efforts to adjust districts and keep them at the same population have been compared to pushing on a balloon: Squeeze one side, and it will bulge on the other side.

In Fayetteville, after District 44 was squeezed on Ramsey Street on the city’s eastern side, it bulged across town on Fayetteville’s western side to compensate.

The mapmakers shifted the Cottonade neighborhood and the neighborhoods along the Reilly Road end of Morganton Road from the Lucas District 42 to the Smith District 44.

This shifted 11,518 people, but it wasn’t enough to completely even out districts’ population totals.

The mapmakers appear to have adjusted District 45 boundaries, represented by Democrat Frances Jackson, along with Districts 42 and 44, to try to balance the population totals among the three districts.

The Lafayette Village neighborhood precinct off Hope Mills Road was moved from District 45 to District 44. Neighborhoods in a precinct in the 71st area north of Raeford Road were moved from District 42 to District 45.

And back along Ramsey Street, Floyd’s Cross Creek 5 precinct along Ramsey Street and the adjoining Cross Creek 16 precinct around E.E. Smith High School were taken from the Smith District 44 and put in the Lucas District 42.

Floyd doesn’t see the changes as unintended consequences forced by the requirements to keep precincts whole and the district populations close to ideal.

“My concern of it is, do the members of the delegation look at the bills before them?” he said — did they see that the new map would go beyond the Lucas request?

“I know what happened. I know what happened,” Floyd said.

Senior North Carolina reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at 910-261-4710 and pwoolverton@fayobserver.com.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Democratic candidate accuses Democrats of rigging election against him