The Memo That Revealed How North Carolina Legislators Rigged Their Own Maps

On a Tuesday morning in November 2023, in a conference room on the third floor of the North Carolina General Assembly's legislative office building, a staff attorney named Margaret Holloway placed her laptop in a drawer, checked that her phone was in her car, and slid a thumb drive across the table to a colleague she had known for eleven years. 'I need you to hold onto this,' she said, according to the colleague, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss internal legislative matters. 'Because what's on it is going to matter someday.'

What was on the drive, and what The Editorial has now reviewed, is a cache of more than four hundred pages of internal communications, methodology documents, and draft maps that reveal how North Carolina's Republican legislative leadership worked with an out-of-state mapping firm to construct congressional and state legislative districts designed to guarantee supermajority control — even in years when Democrats won a majority of statewide votes.

The documents, which span from January 2021 to October 2023, show a level of coordination and intentionality that was never disclosed to the courts during multiple rounds of redistricting litigation. They include explicit instructions to 'optimise for durability' — a phrase that appears seventeen times across the communications — and references to demographic projections that legislators publicly denied possessing.

The Firm Nobody Had Heard Of

At the centre of the documents is a firm called Meridian Strategies LLC, registered in Virginia in 2019. It has no website, no public-facing materials, and no listed clients. Virginia corporate filings reviewed by The Editorial show that its registered agent is a law firm in Alexandria that specialises in political compliance matters. The firm's sole listed principal is a man named David Hofeller — the son of Thomas Hofeller, the Republican redistricting strategist whose personal files were discovered after his death in 2018 and revealed decades of racial gerrymandering strategy.

David Hofeller did not respond to multiple requests for comment sent to addresses associated with Meridian Strategies. A spokesperson for the North Carolina General Assembly's Republican leadership declined to comment on the documents, stating: 'We do not discuss internal legislative processes or privileged communications.'

The internal documents describe Meridian's work in clinical terms. In one email dated March 14, 2022, a staff member writes to Senator Ralph Hise, who co-chairs the redistricting committee: 'Meridian has completed the durability analysis for the western districts. Attachment shows projected partisan performance through 2032 under three turnout scenarios.' The attachment, included in the cache, models Democratic vote shares at 47%, 50%, and 53% turnout levels — and shows that even in the highest Democratic turnout scenario, Republican candidates would win eleven of fourteen congressional seats.

What the Courts Never Saw

North Carolina's redistricting maps have been litigated repeatedly. In Harper v. Hall, the state Supreme Court struck down the 2021 maps as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders in February 2022. But after Republicans won a majority on the court in November 2022, the new court reversed course, ruling in April 2023 that partisan gerrymandering claims were non-justiciable under the state constitution.

Throughout this litigation, legislative defendants repeatedly asserted that they had not used partisan data to draw the maps. In a December 2021 deposition, Senator Hise testified: 'We did not instruct anyone to draw maps based on partisan performance data.' The documents reviewed by The Editorial directly contradict this testimony. A January 2021 email from a legislative staffer to Meridian Strategies states: 'Senator Hise has asked for a full partisan index overlay on the base map before we proceed. Please use the 2020 composite.'

Michael Li, senior counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice's Democracy Program, reviewed the documents at The Editorial's request. 'What's striking is the candour,' he said. 'Internal legislative communications are usually carefully worded because staff know they might be subpoenaed. These read like they were written by people who believed they would never be seen.'

The documents were never produced during discovery in the Harper litigation. According to a former legislative staff attorney who spoke on condition of anonymity, communications with Meridian Strategies were classified as attorney-client privileged because the firm's invoices were routed through the legislature's outside counsel. 'The whole point was to create a privilege shield,' this person said. 'Everyone understood that.'

The Durability Index

The most revealing document in the cache is a forty-seven-page methodology memo titled 'Durability Indexing for North Carolina Legislative and Congressional Districts.' Dated February 2021 and marked 'PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL,' it describes a proprietary scoring system that rates each proposed district on a scale from 1 to 100 based on its resistance to demographic and electoral change.

The memo explains that the durability index incorporates not only partisan voting history but also 'population stability metrics,' 'age cohort projections,' and 'residential mobility patterns.' It cites census data, American Community Survey microdata, and what it describes as 'proprietary voter file enhancements' — suggesting the use of commercial data beyond what is publicly available.

In one section, the memo discusses how to draw districts that can withstand legal challenge. 'Courts have consistently held that traditional redistricting criteria — compactness, contiguity, preservation of communities of interest — provide sufficient justification for district configurations,' it states. 'Our recommendation is to ensure that any durability-optimised district can be defended on traditional criteria grounds, even where those criteria were not the primary driver of the configuration.'

The Official Response

The Editorial provided a detailed summary of the documents to the offices of Senator Hise, Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger, and House Speaker Tim Moore. All three declined to comment. A spokesperson for the North Carolina Republican Party, reached by phone, said: 'We're not going to respond to stolen documents that may or may not be authentic.'

The Editorial has verified the authenticity of the documents through multiple means, including metadata analysis, confirmation from three individuals with direct knowledge of the redistricting process, and comparison with publicly filed documents that contain matching formatting, signatures, and reference numbers.

Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, which was a plaintiff in the Harper litigation, said the documents were 'deeply troubling but not surprising.' 'We always suspected there was more going on behind closed doors than what was being disclosed,' he said. 'But suspicion isn't evidence. This is evidence.'

What Happens Now

The legal implications of the documents are uncertain. North Carolina's current Supreme Court has held that partisan gerrymandering claims cannot be brought under the state constitution. Federal courts, following the U.S. Supreme Court's 2019 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause — a case that also originated in North Carolina — have similarly closed the door to partisan gerrymandering challenges under the federal Constitution.

But the documents may have implications beyond redistricting. If legislative staff or officials made false statements under oath during the Harper litigation, that could constitute perjury. If the attorney-client privilege was misused to shield non-legal communications from discovery, that could constitute fraud on the court. Three legal experts consulted by The Editorial said the documents warranted investigation by either the state bar or law enforcement.

'What these documents show is that the system worked exactly as it was designed to work — designed by the people it was supposed to constrain,' said Carolyn Shapiro, a professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law who specialises in election law. 'The privilege claims, the denials, the methodology — it was all built to be litigation-proof. And it was.'

Margaret Holloway, the staff attorney who first preserved the documents, resigned from the legislature in January 2024. Reached by phone, she declined to comment on the record. But the colleague who received the thumb drive that November morning recalled what Holloway said as she left the conference room: 'I came here to make the law work. I stayed long enough to watch people break it.'