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 its Louisiana v Callais ruling in April, Alabama took the extraordinary step of moving its imminent congressional primary and sought to use the 2023 congressional map this year.
“The court recognized what we already knew: the Alabama legislature’s repeated refusal to provide Black Alabamians with fair representation in Congress is racial discrimination,” said Davin Rosborough, deputy director of the voting rights project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented some of the plaintiffs in the case. “What we must remember is the long history of voter suppression in the south and how many people fought and died for their right to vote. Black voters deserve a voice and a seat at the table, and if Alabama won’t provide one, we will demand one in the courts, in the legislature and in the streets.”
Alabama’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, a Republican, said he would appeal the decision to the US supreme court.
“I am disappointed, but not at all surprised, that the three-judge panel has again struck down Alabama’s blandly unobjectionable congressional map that has been in place for decades,” he said in a statement. “Know this – in my mind, it is not a matter of whether we win this case, only when.”
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 the judge Stanley Marcus of the US court of appeals for the 11th circuit, a Bill Clinton appointee, as well as US district court 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 that said Republicans were resurrecting an ugly chapter in American history and intentionally denying Black voters a say in the political process.
Meanwhile in Florida, the new congressional map the state adopted last month, which could give the GOP four additional seats in November’s midterm elections, survived its first test in court, with a judge allowing it to stay in place while a gerrymandering lawsuit continues.
Three voting rights groups which filed a lawsuit argued that the map violates a state ban on partisan gerrymandering that was passed in 2010 by almost 63% of voters. But the judge, Joshua Hawkes of the second judicial circuit in Tallahassee, an appointee of Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor, said they had not sufficiently proven that the maps had been drawn with partisan intent.
That is despite the DeSantis aide Jason Poreda, who drew the new map, telling state lawmakers last month that he had done so based partly on the partisan breakdown of voters.
“The election machinery of the state is already under way,” Hawkes added. “The primary is less than three months away, and the general less than six months. The public interest weighs more in favor of certainty than a haphazard judicial mandate of discarded maps.”
Under the previous congressional map, which had been used since 2022, Democrats held eight of Florida’s 28 congressional districts. Under the new map, they are favored to win just four.
In the wake of the US supreme court’s ruling in Louisiana v Callais, DeSantis signed off on the new map, which carved up a Black-majority, Democratic-held district in south Florida, and eliminated Democratic-held seats in Tampa Bay and Orlando.
Lawyers for the DeSantis administration argued that a partisan intent had not been proven, a full trial should take place and the state no longer needed to abide by the ban on partisan gerrymandering.
Hawkes wrote that the plaintiffs’ challenge “is more geared toward the 2028 or 2030 election cycles than the 2026 election cycle”.
