Major cheating scandal rocks North Carolina’s redistricting review

Raleigh, NC – Legislative Republicans filed an emergency motion on Monday in Wake County Superior Court seeking to block two liberal professors from helping review revised congressional and legislative maps.

The professors from Princeton and Brigham Young universities were assigned to help three special masters review technical aspects of the maps for a three-judge Superior Court panel, but were directly ordered by the court not to contact parties and witnesses in the lawsuit.

However, it’s been uncovered that two of the four assistants to the professors, Sam Wang of Princeton and Tyler Jarvis of BYU, engaged in “substantive ex parte communications” with the plaintiffs’ experts in the case. “Ex parte” is a legal term meaning that only one side of a legal dispute participated in the communication. The legislative defendants were informed on Sunday, Feb. 20, that the illegal communications also occurred on Friday, Feb. 18th.

The three-judge panel named former state Supreme Court Justices Bob Orr and Bob Edmunds and former UNC System President Thomas Ross to serve as special masters. Ross is also a former judge and director of the state Administrative Office of the Courts. The special masters will help the panel review legislative maps. The special masters can also recommend their own maps for the court’s adoption.

Special masters and those working with them are forbidden from communicating with either the plaintiffs or defendants in the case. The legislative defendants say . . . (Read more)