The United States Supreme Court recently rejected Alabama’s appeal to use a congressional map in the 2024 elections; a map that a lower court deemed in breach of the Voting Rights Act. The unsigned order revealed no public dissents, coming four months after a divided Supreme Court agreed that the 2021 version of the map violated federal law by reducing the collective voting power of the state’s Black voters.
This dismissal by the Supreme Court means the redistricting process in Alabama must proceed, with court-appointed experts tasked with creating new maps that incorporate a second majority-Black district. The disagreement arose from Alabama’s attempts to develop a new congressional map, following the 2020 census, for its seven seats in the House of Representatives. With nearly 27% of the state’s residents being Black, the map passed by the state’s legislature in 2021 only presented one majority-Black district, which led voters and civil rights groups to challenge the legality of the map in federal court.
The federal court in Alabama sided with the challengers, concluding that the 2021 map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting. Despite temporarily allowing Alabama to use their map in the 2022 elections pending review, the Supreme Court upholds the lower court’s decision in favor of the challengers in June earlier this year.
The state legislature enacted another plan in July that once again featured only one majority-Black district. Deciding it was “substantially likely” that the 2023 map violates the Voting Rights Act due to its failure to designate another majority-Black district, the lower court assigned two experts to draft a new map. Alabama made a second appeal to the Supreme Court on September 11, requesting rapid intervention. The state argued that the lower court rejected the 2023 map solely because it lacked a second majority-Black district, something the state posits that the Supreme Court has stated as non-mandatory.
The petitioners strongly urged the justices not to interfere in the case. They compared Alabama’s reluctance to design a second district that gives Black voters the chance to elect their preferred candidate to southern states’ opposition to desegregation during the civil rights era. The petitioners warned that pausing the lower courts’ orders would almost certainly allow the state to conduct the 2024 elections under a “dilutive” plan deemed unlawful.
The justices refused Alabama’s request to interfere in the disagreement through unsigned orders issued one morning. If there were any opposing views amongst the justices regarding the disposition of the request, they were not publicly expressed.
This was originally published at Howe on the Court.