Federal court blocks new Republican-friendly voting map in Alabama

Alabama cannot use a new Republican-friendly map in this year’s midterm elections because it was drawn to intentionally discriminate against Black voters, a panel of three federal judges ruled on Tuesday.The decision blocks Alabama from using a congressional map lawmakers passed in 2023 but never went into effect because the same court found it was drawn with intent to discriminate. Alabama was eventually ordered to adopt a map with two majority-Black districts that both elected Democrats. After the US supreme court gutted a major provision of the Voting Rights Act in a case called Louisiana v Callais in April, Alabama took the extraordinary step of moving its imminent congressional primary and sought to use the 2023 congressional map this year.The state will probably appeal to the US supreme court.But Tuesday’s ruling was significant because the judges said the supreme court’s landmark ruling on the Voting Rights Act did not permit Alabama to use the map.“We cannot see our way clear to requiring Alabamians to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” the court wrote in its opinion. “We again cannot understand the 2023 Plan as anything other than intentionally discriminatory.”The panel consisted of Judge Stanley Marcus of the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit, a Bill Clinton appointee, as well as US district Judges Anna Manasco and Terry Moorer, who were both appointed by Donald Trump.The case will probably present the US supreme court with another test of the possible limits of the supreme court’s ruling weakening the Voting Rights Act. In his opinion for the majority of the court, Justice Samuel Alito said maps that were drawn with an intent to discriminate – an extremely high bar to prove – could still be challenged. The Alabama case will be the first test of whether that is true.To reach its decision the court reviewed a lengthy record in a long-running legal battle over Alabama’s maps that began in 2021. That year, a group of Black plaintiffs sued the state over its congressional map, saying its configuration diluted the influence of Black voters in the state. The panel ultimately agreed, and ordered the state to draw a new map. Lawmakers then passed the 2023 plan, which the court said still diluted the influence of Black voters. A court-appointed special master ultimately drew Alabama’s map, and added a second majority-Black district. The plan was ultimately upheld by the US supreme court in 2023 .In its decision on Tuesday, the three-judge panel revisited the circumstances around the legislature’s decision to pass the 2023 map and found it was enacted with discriminatory intent.“When the Legislature enacted the 2023 Plan, it made a calculated, purposeful decision to refuse to provide the remedy for discriminatory vote dilution that our order (affirmed by the Supreme Court) required,” the panel wrote.“The Legislature well knew that a plan without an additional Black-opportunity district would dilute Black Alabamians’ opportunity to participate in the political process, and it intentionally enacted that very plan,” they wrote. Further, the Legislature well knew what dilutive mechanisms would prevent Black voters in Alabama’s Black Belt and Gulf Coast communities from having any opportunity to elect representatives of their choice, and the Legislature employed precisely those mechanisms.”The effort to redraw the map in Alabama was part of a Republican-led blitz across the US south to redraw after the Callais decision with the goal of adding Republican-friendly seats ahead of this fall’s midterm elections. Tennessee implemented a new congressional map wiping out a majority-Black congressional district based in Memphis. Louisiana is also poised to get rid of a majority-Black district and South Carolina may follow soon after.Those efforts were all met with widespread outcry from Black leaders and civil rights groups who said Republicans were resurrecting an ugly chapter in American history and intentionally denying Black voters a say in the political process.