Federal court again blocks Alabama congressional map, finds intentional discrimination against Black voters – JURIST

A three-judge panel of federal court in Birmingham on Tuesday barred Alabama from using its Republican-drawn congressional map in this year’s elections, ruling that the map intentionally discriminated against Black voters—a conclusion the panel reached even after a recent US Supreme Court decision that made such claims significantly harder to win.

The court ordered Secretary of State Wes Allen to administer the rest of Alabama’s 2026 congressional elections using a court-drawn, race-blind map, the same one Alabama used in the 2024 election and under which voters have already cast ballots in this year’s primaries. Switching maps now, the judges said, would risk disrupting elections already under way. The order will expire if the Legislature passes a new plan.

“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 judges wrote.

The ruling is among the first to apply a tougher standard the Supreme Court announced last month in Louisiana v. Callais, which overhauled the decades-old framework for evaluating Voting Rights Act claims. The justices had thrown out the panel’s earlier ruling against the Alabama map and sent the case back for reconsideration. After taking another look, the panel said its conclusion was unchanged: “We again cannot understand the 2023 Plan as anything other than intentionally discriminatory.”

The dispute dates to Alabama’s redistricting after the 2020 census, which produced a map with only one majority-Black district even though Black residents make up more than a quarter of the state’s population. After the Supreme Court affirmed in 2023 that the original map likely violated the Voting Rights Act, the Legislature passed a replacement that again drew just one majority-Black district. The state conceded the new plan did not add a second district where Black voters could elect their preferred candidate.

Those two choices are connected. The Black Belt—a rural band of central Alabama named for its dark soil and home to a large share of the state’s Black residents—is too sparsely populated to form a congressional district on its own. The most direct way to draw a second district where Black voters could elect their preferred candidate is to pair Black Belt counties with the sizable Black population of Mobile, on the Gulf Coast. By keeping Mobile bundled with heavily white Baldwin County in one coastal district, the Legislature’s map removed that building block, leaving Black Belt voters split among majority-white districts.

The court found that the refusal, paired with a series of “highly unusual steps” pointed to the conclusion that the map was designed “to distribute Black voters across districts to dilute their votes, at least in part because they are Black.”

These steps included eight pages of “legislative findings” that lawmakers bolted onto the 2023 map, something the court said Alabama had never done in any previous redistricting bill. The findings declared it “non-negotiable” to keep the Gulf Coast counties together, cementing the arrangement that foreclosed a second Black district. Yet lawmakers pointedly declined to make the non-dilution of Black voting strength non-negotiable, quietly dropping that protection from the Legislature’s own longstanding guidelines even though vote dilution was the entire reason the session was being held. The findings devoted several pages to the Gulf Coast and its “French and Spanish colonial heritage” while describing the Black Belt in a few short sentences, and deleted language the state had earlier agreed to acknowledging that the region’s Black population descends from people enslaved there. And though the map existed only because the courts had ordered a second district where Black voters could elect their candidate of choice, the findings said nothing about such a district at all.

Alabama had argued that partisanship, not race, explained the map. But the panel said the record contained “zero evidence” of a partisan motive. It found that voting in the state remains driven by race rather than party, citing evidence that Black Alabamians hold conservative views on issues such as abortion yet vote overwhelmingly Democratic. “[I]f party politics drove voting patterns in Alabama,” the court wrote, “it is unclear why Black voters don’t support the party that aligns more closely with their values.”

Allen, who has taken each of the prior injunctions to the Supreme Court, has already appealed.