The United States Supreme Court has ruled that Alabama must redraw its congressional maps to represent Black voters adequately.
The 5-4 decision means officials will have to reconfigure district lines to create a new majority-minority district, all but guaranteeing the Democrats a second seat in Alabama’s congressional delegation.
Per Forbes:
The court’s ruling leaves in place section two of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that are racially discriminatory.
According to the state government, 27% of Alabama’s five million residents are Black. In the current map, 14% reside in a primarily Black congressional district, while the remaining 13% are spread throughout the state’s six remaining districts.
With the Court having decided that Alabama diluted Black voting strength, political prognosticator Dave Wasserman said similar rulings could come to Louisiana, South Carolina and Georgia — potentially netting the Democrats between two to four congressional seats.
Today’s decision follows years of legal maneuvering, as Forbes explains:
Alabama asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the constitutionality of its congressional map in January 2022 after a three-judge panel in a lower court—including two appointed by former President Donald Trump—struck down the state’s congressional map and ordered a map be drawn that had two majority-Black districts. The court’s ruling is the latest in a string of cases before the court over the past decade that have concerned the Voting Rights Act. The 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder struck down the law’s fourth section, and the court further limited the law’s scope with Abbott v. Perez in 2018 and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee in 2021, which also concerned the Voting Rights Act’s second section and made it easier to impose restrictive voting laws.
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