[How the Supreme Court’s decision on the census could alter American politics.]
Until now, Mr. Hofeller seemed a bystander in the citizenship-question debate, mentioned but once in thousands of pages of lawsuit depositions and evidence. Proof of his deeper involvement surfaced only recently, and only after a remarkable string of events beginning after his death in August at age 75.
Mr. Hofeller was survived by a daughter, Stephanie Hofeller, from whom he had been estranged since 2014. In an interview, Ms. Hofeller said she learned of her father’s death by accident after searching for his name on the internet, and returned to her parents’ retirement home in Raleigh, N.C., to see her mother, Kathleen Hofeller.
Sorting through Mr. Hofeller’s personal effects, looking for items she had asked her father to save for her, Stephanie Hofeller came across a clear plastic bag holding four external hard drives and 18 thumb drives, backups of data on Mr. Hofeller’s Toshiba laptop. Her mother gave Ms. Hofeller the backups, which turned out to hold some 75,000 files — family photographs and other personal data, but also a huge trove of documents related to Mr. Hofeller’s work as a Republican consultant.
Late last year, Ms. Hofeller said, she contacted the Raleigh office of the advocacy group Common Cause, seeking its help in finding a lawyer unconnected to her father to help settle his estate. Only after several conversations with a staff member there did she mention the hard drives in passing, she said, remarking almost jokingly that an expert on gerrymanders might find a lot in them that was of interest.
“My understanding was that anything that would be on these hard drives was duplicative of things that had already been hashed out” in court challenges to Mr. Hofeller’s maps, she said.
In fact, Common Cause had recently filed a new lawsuit in state court, challenging gerrymandered maps of North Carolina’s legislative districts drawn by Mr. Hofeller himself. When the staff member told her of the lawsuit, Ms. Hofeller said, she thought, “Wow — this might be of use.”
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