Court rules Alabama congressional map intentionally discriminated against Black voters

Federal judges ruled Thursday that Alabama intentionally discriminated against Black residents when the state disobeyed court orders to draw a second Black-majority congressional district. 

A three-judge panel said the congressional map drawn by the 2023 Alabama Legislature violated the Voting Rights Act. The judges, which ruled against the state twice before and put a new map in place for last year’s elections, have permanently blocked Alabama from using the state-drawn map. 

The judges said the court does not “diminish the substantial improvements Alabama has made in its official treatment of Black Alabamians in recent decades.

“Yet we cannot reconcile the State’s intentional decision to discriminate in drawing its congressional districts with its position that Alabama has finally closed out its repugnant history of official discrimination involving voting rights,” they added. 

The court will now consider whether to place Alabama under Provision 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which would require the state to get federal approval of its congressional plans.

Following the 2020 census, Alabama made six of its seven districts majority white, despite 27 percent of the state’s population being Black.

Though the Supreme Court allowed the map to be used in the 2022 midterms, it also upheld the lower court's findings that the map unlawfully diluted Black votes.

Despite the rulings, the state Legislature refused to redraw the map to include a second congressional district that would allow Black voters to elect the candidate of their choice. 

“This record thus leaves us in no doubt that the purpose of the design of the 2023 Plan was to crack Black voters across congressional districts in a manner that makes it impossible to create two districts in which they have an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, and thereby intentionally perpetuate the discriminatory effects of the 2021 Plan,” the judges said Thursday.

“The Legislature knew what federal law required and purposefully refused to provide it, in a strategic attempt to checkmate the injunction that ordered it,” they wrote. 

Plaintiffs in the case told The Associated Press that the ruling is “a testament to the dedication and persistence of many generations of Black Alabamians who pursued political equality at great cost.”