A redistricting plan afloat in the state House would carve all of the City of Washington out of Beaufort County and place it in House District 9, with a seat of power in western Pitt County.

The plan would remove seven people from the Chocowinity precinct and tuck them into this newly shifted district’s lines.

All of those seven people wouldn’t necessarily be registered voters, related Kellie Harris Hopkins, Beaufort County’s elections director.

The district numbers are based on population, not registered voters, she explained.

Still, county elections officials would have to create a separate ballot style for this handful of residents in the Chocowinity area, even if as little as one or two of the seven people were registered voters, Hopkins said.

“The problem is that if you have two people vote, you’re giving up their ballot secrecy,” she said, meaning public records would leave little doubt about the identity of the voters.

The plan also would extract relatively small numbers of voters from the Old Ford, Tranters Creek and Beaver Dam precincts.

“I just hate to see them split a precinct,” said Tom Payne, chairman of the Beaufort County Board of Elections.

“I was hoping we could decrease the ballot types rather than increase them,” Payne continued. “I’m very disappointed with it.”

If the N.C. General Assembly approves the plan, Beaufort County would be divided in a state House district for the first time in perhaps a generation.

“This time with what they’re doing, it’s terrible,” said former state Rep. Zeno Edwards, D-Beaufort. “And I don’t think it’ll stand up in court.”

The district outline appears to affect the territory currently served by Rep. Edith Warren, D-Pitt, who represents northwest Pitt County and all of Martin County.

A call to Warren wasn’t immediately returned Thursday.

To date, the plan, released Friday on the General Assembly’s website, has attracted bipartisan disapproval from numerous political leaders in Beaufort County, including the chairmen of the county’s Republican and Democratic parties, as reported in Sunday’s Washington Daily News.

The local opposition continued to mount this week.

“I was hoping that Beaufort County would stay whole,” said Al Klemm, a GOP Beaufort County commissioner.

“If Beaufort County stays whole, in my opinion, it gives us a little more influence in relation to the district,” Klemm added.

The Rev. David Moore took a pragmatic view of the issue.

Moore is a longtime Democratic activist and former Beaufort County commissioner.

“If the Republicans are smart, they’re going to try and get as many safe districts as they can, and I don’t blame them there because that’s exactly what the Democrats would do if the Democrats were in charge,” he said. “I don’t want you to think that I’m totally opposed to the Republican Party. That’s just politics.”

Moore expressed skepticism that the majority-minority districts rolled out so far were fashioned to protect minority voting rights.

“I haven’t seen whether either the Democrats or the Republicans are absolutely, totally in love with the minority community,” Moore commented. “It all depends on what the agenda is and how they can keep their positions of power.”

The winding District 9 is one among roughly 25 percent of the state’s legislative districts that were reconfigured in a map unveiled by Rep. David Lewis, R-Harnett, senior chairman of the House redistricting committee.

Lewis and his Senate counterpart, Sen. Bob Rucho, R-Mecklenburg, have defended the new House and Senate maps as necessary to meet the requirements of the federal Voting Rights Act.

The Republican-controlled Legislature will redraw all of the state’s legislative and congressional districts this year. The full plans hadn’t been made public as of Thursday.

The fresh district blueprints likely won’t be come up for votes by lawmakers until they reconvene next month for a special legislative session called to consider redistricting.

Underlining this process is a statistical fact reflected on the General Assembly’s website: the Legislature has no numeric reason to divide House District 6, which currently encompasses all of Beaufort County and eight precincts in northeast Pitt County.

The district is served by Rep. Bill Cook, R-Beaufort. Cook is a member of the House redistricting committee.

Lawmakers are legally bound to reshape districts that don’t meet the “one-person, one-vote” standard. Basically, legislators have to shrink or broaden districts that don’t fall within a 5-percent plus-or-minus variance for the ideal district population.

Following the 2010 census, the ideal population for a state House district was 79,462.

At present, District 6 has a total population of 82,016, a 3.2 percent deviation from the ideal — less than the 5 percent that would compel the Legislature to change the district.