SECRET GERRYMANDERING FILES CAN NOW BE MADE PUBLIC, COURT RULES David Daley
SECRET GERRYMANDERING FILES CAN NOW BE MADE PUBLIC, COURT RULES
David Daley at the Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2019/11/05/gerrymandering-files-thomas-hofeller-public/
"SNIP....
EIGHT YEARS AGO, when Thomas Hofeller addressed state legislators from across the country in the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center at National Harbor, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., he cautioned elected officials working on redistricting to “make sure your computer is in a private location” and warned them not to “walk away from it and leave your work exposed.”
“Remember,” one slide from his presentation reads, “A journey to legal HELL starts with but a single misstatement OR a stupid email!”
Hofeller, a veteran Republican mapmaker, failed to heed his own advice. After his death in 2018, his daughter, Stephanie, discovered backups of over 70,000 of his files. She notified Common Cause, a watchdog organization that works on voting rights, that she had the files, and Common Cause then subpoenaed her to provide them. After a handful were made public — including files that led to the removal of Trump’s citizenship question on the 2020 census — Geographic Strategies, a consulting firm co-founded by Hofeller, sued to keep more of the files from entering the public sphere.
The decision Monday by a North Carolina state court — removing a protective shield from tens of thousands of files belonging to Hofeller, likely making public details of his work on maps as well as litigation in states including Texas, Missouri, Arizona, Virginia, and North Carolina, among others — seemed inconceivable.
.....SNIP"
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RFN 
