The North Carolina Superior Court of Wake County granted a preliminary injunction on Monday barring the use of a new electoral map in the 2020 primary and general elections for illegal partisan gerrymandering.

The plaintiffs, led by the National Redistricting Foundation (NRF), sought to block the state’s remedial electoral map from being used in the 2020 elections. The remedial map was drawn by the Republican-dominated state legislature after the previous map from 2011 was declared unconstitutional in 2017 for illegal racial gerrymandering. The plaintiffs claimed that the remedial map contained extreme partisan gerrymandering that violated the Free Elections Clause of the North Carolina state constitution by drawing district lines to heavily disadvantage Democratic voters. The court agreed, concluding that a motion for preliminary injunctive relief should be granted because the NRF will likely show that 2016 congressional districts violate the North Carolina Constitution’s Free Elections Clause. The court recognized that rejecting the current electoral map may create issues for the state legislature but noted that:

“The General Assembly… has recently shown its capacity to enact new legislative districts in a short amount of time in a transparent and bipartisan manner, and that the resulting legislative districts, having been approved by this Court, are districts that are more likely to achieve the constitutional objective of allowing for elections to be conducted more freely and honestly to ascertain, fairly and truthfully, the will of the people.”

The NRF announced the victory in a tweet, saying “after a decade of legal battles and manipulated maps, voters just took a big step toward.”

The United States Supreme Court ruled in June that partisan gerrymandering cases were beyond the reach of the federal court system, but left open the door for state constitutional challenges to electoral maps. A similar challenge to Pennsylvania’s electoral map was successful in 2018.