A Salisbury Post article by John Hood worth reading about North Carolina redistricting:

“Anyone who tells you that North Carolina’s redistricting process is simple enough to be put on autopilot has not read the relevant court cases. If our state wasn’t under the jurisdiction of the Voting Rights Act, redistricting could indeed be largely accomplished by a series of mathematical formulas. . . . The problem is that there is no consensus about what the Voting Rights Act requires. As legislative staffers explain in this helpful backgrounder on the General Assembly website, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Gingles decision compels North Carolina to avoid “retrogression” of minority voting interests in the 40 counties subject to Section 5 of the VRA. Historically, that was interpreted to mean that redistricting maps were impermissible if they appeared to make it less likely that minorities could elected representatives from among their own group if they so desired.”