# Common Cause v. Lewis North Carolina state-court case that struck down the state's 2017 legislative maps as **partisan gerrymanders under the North Carolina Constitution**. A three-judge panel of the Wake County Superior Court ruled on **September 3, 2019**, after a trial from July 15 to 26. It ordered the General Assembly to redraw the maps by September 19. The court approved the new maps on October 28, 2019, and they were used in the 2020 elections. [[Common Cause]] filed the suit on November 13, 2018. The ruling came ten weeks after the Supreme Court closed federal courts to partisan-gerrymandering claims in [[Rucho v. Common Cause]], leaving state constitutions as the remaining route. ## The Hofeller files The 2017 maps had been drawn by [[Thomas Hofeller]], who died in 2018. His estranged daughter later gave his backup drives to Common Cause, and the files became evidence in this case. They also became evidence in the federal challenge to the census citizenship question ([[Department of Commerce v. New York]]). In North Carolina, plaintiffs said the files showed Hofeller had largely finished the maps before the legislature's public process began. The plaintiffs' expert, Jowei Chen, testified that Hofeller had put the Black voting-age population of each district into nearly every draft. On November 4, 2019, the court released Hofeller's files on redistricting in other states from its protective order. ## What happened next The state-court route this case opened did not last. In 2023 a newly Republican North Carolina Supreme Court held that partisan-gerrymandering claims cannot be brought under the state constitution either. See [[Gerrymandering]] and [[Moore v. Harper]].