Alabama does not have to redraw its congressional map for the 2022 elections, the US supreme court ruled on Monday, a win for Republicans that will leave in place a plan that has been described as a textbook example of discrimination against Black voters in the US.
Monday’s supreme court ruling boosts the party’s chances to hold six of the state’s seven seats in the House of Representatives.
The court’s action, by a 5-4 vote, means the upcoming elections will be conducted under a map drawn by Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature that contains one majority-Black district, represented by a Black Democrat, in a state in which more than a quarter of the population is Black. Chief Justice John Roberts joined with the court’s three liberal justices in dissenting from the ruling.
A three-judge lower court, including two judges appointed by Donald Trump, had ruled that the state had likely violated the federal Voting Rights Act by diluting the political power of Black voters by not creating a second district in which they made up a majority, or close to it.
Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito, part of the conservative majority, said a lower court acted too close to the 2022 election cycle. Kavanaugh said he had not reached a conclusion on the larger question in the case – whether Alabama had violated the Voting Rights Act – but cited a legal principle saying that courts should not change election rules close to an election.
“Running elections state-wide is extraordinarily complicated and difficult. Those elections require enormous advance preparations by state and local officials, and pose significant logistical challenges,” he wrote. “The district court’s order would require heroic efforts by those state and local authorities in the next few weeks – and even heroic efforts likely would not be enough to avoid chaos and confusion.”
Justice Elena Kagan blasted that argument in a dissenting opinion on behalf of the court’s three liberal justices. Alabama’s primary isn’t until 24 May, she noted, and lawmakers were able to draw the state’s current congressional map in less than a week. The plaintiffs in the case challenged the maps hours after they were signed into law, and the lower court quickly reached a decision.
“Alabama is not entitled to keep violating Black Alabamians’ voting rights just because the court’s order came down in the first month of an election year,” she wrote.
Kagan added that the court’s decision to block the map without fully hearing the case “does a disservice to Black Alabamians who under that precedent have had their electoral power diminished – in violation of a law this court once knew to buttress all of American democracy.”
Writing for himself, Roberts said he believed the lower court correctly applied existing case law and would have required Alabama to redraw its districts for 2022. But he also acknowledged there was uncertainty in the case law that needed to be addressed.
In their brief to the supreme court, a group of plaintiffs in the case said a ruling that it was too late to impose new maps would send a dangerous message in future cases.
Lawmakers redrew the state’s congressional districts following the results of the 2020 census. Several groups of voters sued, arguing that the new maps diluted the voting power of Black residents in violation of the constitution and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
In a unanimous ruling in late January, the three judges said that the groups were likely to succeed in showing that the state had violated the Voting Rights Act. As a result, the panel ordered lawmakers to redraw the districts so Black voters would be a majority, or close to it, in two districts, not one. The ruling ran more than 200 pages.
The panel wrote that “we do not regard the question ... as a close one”.
Alabama asked the supreme court to put the ruling on hold while it appealed and the justices agreed. The state argued that it had drawn the new map guided by race-neutral principles and that the new map is similar to past maps.
More than a dozen mostly Republican-led states had filed a brief urging the justices to side with Alabama and allow it to use the maps it originally drew.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
