Three weeks after the November 2016 election, the District Court ordered additional relief. In addition to setting a March 2017 deadline for the General Assembly's drawing of new districts, the court ordered that “[t]he term of any legislator elected in 2016” from a district later modified by that remedial plan “shall be shortened to one year” (rather than the regular two).
Id., at 203. Those legislators would then be replaced by new ones, to be chosen in court-ordered special elections in the fall of 2017. The legislators elected in those special elections, too, were then to “serve a one year term.”
Id., at 204. Finally, in order to make this regime workable, the court also suspended provisions of the North Carolina Constitution requiring prospective legislators to reside within a district for one year before they may be elected to represent it. See
id., at 203 (citing
N.C. Const. Art. II, §§ 6–
7). To explain why these measures were warranted, the court stated: “While special elections have costs, those costs pale in comparison to the injury caused by allowing citizens to continue to be represented by legislators elected pursuant to a racial gerrymander.” App. to Juris. Statement 200.