gerrymandering

Updated at 4:18 p.m. ET

Democrats would be well-positioned to pick up two U.S. House seats currently held by Republicans under a redistricting plan approved by North Carolina lawmakers on Friday.

The plan follows a ruling by a state court last month that said North Carolina Republicans, who control the legislature, had violated the state constitution by unfairly disadvantaging Democrats. Republicans hold 10 of the state's 13 U.S. House districts under the existing congressional maps even though the state is closely politically divided.

Updated Nov. 13 at 3:50 p.m. ET

A prominent GOP redistricting strategist had direct communication with an adviser to the Trump administration concerning the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census, newly released emails show.

The emails were released Tuesday by the House Oversight and Reform Committee, which has been conducting an investigation into the origins of the citizenship question that the Trump administration failed to add to forms for the upcoming national head count.

North Carolina state Sen. Rick Horner is pointing at a colorful computer screen.

A staffer points and clicks, points and clicks, slightly changing the dimensions of the red, yellow and cyan jigsaw puzzle at Horner's request.

It's a map of the voting districts of North Carolina. Horner, a Republican, is shaping democracy — and generally having a ball.

The Supreme Court recently ruled on political gerrymandering, the practice of cutting up voting districts to benefit one party over another. But some are advocating for an end to another type of gerrymandering.

It’s called “prison gerrymandering,” where inmates are counted as living at the prison, instead of their home addresses. The result is an inflated constituent count in prison districts, while the communities where the prisoners lived end up under-represented.

Weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal courts can't intervene in cases where state lawmakers have aggressively drawn political boundaries to benefit one political party over another, a new front in the nation's redistricting battles opens Monday in a North Carolina courtroom.

New Jersey is a decisively Democratic state, but last year Democratic lawmakers there decided to try to cement their power even further.

Hillary Clinton won by 14 percentage points in 2016. Barack Obama won by 17 percentage points before that, and a Republican hasn't won a Senate race there since 1972.

Even so, the state Legislature introduced a plan that would overhaul the map-making process in a way that would guarantee Republicans became a "permanent minority."

With less than two weeks left in the U.S. Supreme Court's term, the justices handed down four decisions on Monday. Defying predictions, three were decided by shifting liberal-conservative coalitions.

Here, in a nutshell, are the results, as well as the fascinating shifting votes:

Dual sovereignty upheld, with Ginsburg, Gorsuch dissenting

Legislative districts in Virginia that the Supreme Court previously said were racially gerrymandered have to remain in their redrawn form, the court said Monday, giving Democrats in the state a victory.

The majority decision was written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who noted that because the entirety of state government wasn't suing to keep the fight going — the case was brought by the state's GOP-controlled House — then it is throwing the case out.

Updated on June 7 at 4:30 p.m. ET

The way Thomas Hofeller talked about redistricting — the drawing of political boundaries and the sifting of voters into buckets — you could be forgiven if you assumed he was speaking about a loved one or a favorite holiday.

It's decision season at the U.S. Supreme Court, and there are a host of consequential cases the justices are deciding, from a controversial Trump administration proposal to adding a citizenship question to the census to gerrymandering and a question of separation of church and state.

As always, timing of which exact cases will be decided is unknown until the court releases them. The only clues are when the cases were argued, and, sometimes, that's not predictive either.