# North Carolina v. Covington The litigation over North Carolina's 2011 state legislative maps. Filed in May 2015 as *Covington v. North Carolina*, it ended with a three-judge federal court holding that **28 districts (9 in the state Senate and 19 in the House) were racial gerrymanders**. On **June 5, 2017**, the Supreme Court affirmed that ruling without opinion. It also set aside the lower court's order for special elections in 2017 and told the panel to reconsider whether they were needed. The 2011 maps were drawn by [[Thomas Hofeller]]. In July 2017 legislative leaders told the federal court they had not yet started drawing replacement districts and needed time for criteria and public input. The court did not order special elections that year. Hofeller's files, found after his death, told a different story. Plaintiffs in [[Common Cause v. Lewis]] said the files showed he had "substantially completed" the replacement maps by June 2017, weeks before the legislature adopted its mapmaking criteria on August 10, 2017. They also said he had racial data in every draft, which legislators had told the court was not loaded into the mapmaker's computer. A North Carolina court struck down those 2017 replacement maps in 2019. See [[Cooper v. Harris]] for the companion ruling on the 2011 congressional map, and [[Gerrymandering]].