Supreme Court Allows Alabama to Use Congressional Map With One Majority-Black District

The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way on Monday for Alabama officials to pursue a congressional voting map that reduces the number of districts where Black voters comprise a majority or near-majority from two to one out of seven. The justices lifted a lower court's decision that had blocked the map as racially discriminatory and for illegally diluting the voting power of Black Alabamians.

Alabama officials are expected to seek to revert to this previous map ahead of November's midterm elections. Use of the previous map could be beneficial to Republicans. The order was powered by the court's conservative majority. The three liberal justices dissented.

Background on the Maps In 2023 the Supreme Court had upheld a lower court's decision that Alabama's Republican-drawn electoral map diluted Black voters' power in violation of the Voting Rights Act. That 5-4 ruling required the state to use a map that includes two majority-Black districts out of seven.

Both are held by Black Democrats. Alabama, where Black voters make up a quarter of the electorate, had been ordered by a lower court to use the new map. The lower court decided that a prior map had intentionally discriminated against Black voters and unlawfully diluted their voting power.

Following the Supreme Court's April 29 decision in a Louisiana case, Alabama immediately filed emergency motions asking the justices to allow it to revert to the older map with only a single majority-Black district. In that 6-3 ruling the court struck down an electoral map that had given Louisiana a second Black-majority district, saying it relied too heavily on race in violation of the constitutional equal protection principle.

Alabama officials had argued in Supreme Court filings that the court-ordered map shared the same constitutional defects as Louisiana's. In a dissent, one liberal justice emphasized that the lower court's ruling concerning Alabama's map was more expansive than the Louisiana case and included a finding of unconstitutional discrimination by intentionally diluting the votes of Black voters in Alabama.

The majority's decision to set aside the lower court's ruling is therefore inappropriate and will cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week, the dissent stated. The liberal justices suggested that the lower court could reapply its judicial block to the map.

In a process called redistricting, the boundaries of legislative districts across the United States are reconfigured to reflect population changes as measured by the national census conducted every 10 years. Redistricting is typically carried out by state legislatures once per decade.

Republicans and Democrats have been engaged in a multistate redistricting fight that began last year when an effort was initiated to redraw maps in Republican-led states. Alabama is among a group of Republican-led states that has sought to eliminate majority-Black congressional districts following the Supreme Court's ruling undercutting a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

Black voters tend to support Democratic candidates.