It happened on Feb. 4, but it felt like the Fourth of July when the North Carolina Supreme Court gave new life to democracy on Friday by shutting down partisan gerrymandering.

In a state where fair legislative and congressional elections have been thwarted for a decade by Republican lawmakers essentially hand-picking their voters for partisan advantage, the high court found that anti-democratic practice to be a violation of the North Carolina Constitution’s requirement for free elections and its protections of free speech and freedom of assembly.

“To comply with the limitations contained in the North Carolina Constitution which are applicable to redistricting plans, the General Assembly must not diminish or dilute any individual’s vote on the basis of partisan affiliation,” the court said.

The 4-3 decision, with the court’s four Democratic justices in the majority, brings a halt to the Republican-led General Assembly’s rank abuse of its redistricting authority. After the legislature passed heavily gerrymandered maps in 2011, Republicans went on to enjoy lopsided election advantages in most of the state’s legislative and congressional districts.

Skewing maps to preordain the outcome of elections is poisonous for democracy. On Friday, the court’s majority delivered an antidote – and a fast-acting one.

The court won’t tolerate the delaying tactics Republican lawmakers used last decade that allowed elections based on maps later found to be illegal or illegal maps that could not be redrawn in time. The court’s order instructs the legislature to redraw the U.S. House and the North Carolina House and Senate maps in two weeks. If the lawmakers send back another insult to free elections, a panel of Wake County judges will select new maps.

Not surprisingly, Republican lawmakers criticized the court’s majority for intruding on their right to skew elections in their favor. State Sen. Ralph Hise (R-Mitchell), who co-chairs the Senate Redistricting Committee, said, “Democratic judges, lawyers, and activists have worked in concert to transform the Supreme Court into a policy-making body to impose their political ideas.”

This is an odd complaint. The Democrats on the state Supreme Court did what the Republican Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court suggested they do. In 2019, John Roberts, writing the majority opinion in a 5–4 decision on partisan gerrymandering – a case that rose in part from North Carolina – said that the highest federal court had no basis to rule against partisan gerrymandering because the Constitution is silent about defining fair districts. But he also said, “Provisions in state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply.”

Roberts dodged an issue his court should have addressed, but he nonetheless left the door open for state courts to rule on partisan gerrymandering.

Lawyers for the Republican defendants argued that the North Carolina Constitution also provides no guidance on at what point the political act of drawing maps produces an unconstitutional outcome. But that argument is undermined by the very technology Republicans used to cross the line into extreme partisan gerrymandering.

Republican mapmakers employed sophisticated computer programs to skew maps to gain their maximum partisan advantage. But experts for the plaintiffs used computer programs to show how the Republican maps were more extreme than countless other options.

In this case, experts said the Republican-drawn maps would give Republicans 10 or 11 of the state’s 14 congressional seats and could return the party to a veto-proof majority in both chambers of the General Assembly. Even the three-judge Superior Court panel that upheld the Republican maps as drawn within a legal process said their effect would be “incompatible with democratic principles.”

Elections are not free if their outcomes are all but assured in advance. The court recognized this Friday.

The Fourth of February was a great day for democracy in North Carolina. Let freedom ring.