Activists rally in Montgomery to protest repeal of black voting rights
Demonstrators in Montgomery, Alabama, gathered to express their opposition to a Supreme Court ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act.
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court said June 2 that Alabama may use a congressional map that was previously deemed to have intentionally discriminated against Black voters. The conservative court’s latest redistricting will help Republicans in their efforts to maintain a narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in the midterm elections.
The ruling confirms how difficult, if not impossible, it is for racial minorities to challenge electoral maps after the court significantly relaxed the Voting Rights Act in April.
In an unsigned opinion dissented by the court’s three liberal justices, the majority suspended a lower court’s ruling that blocked Alabama from using the disputed map.
The map, passed by the Republican-led Legislature in 2023, includes only one district with a large black population, instead of the two districts included in the map that lower courts said the state must use.
The three-judge panel said the Republican-favored map was “tainted with intentional racism.”
“We conducted a thorough review of extensive and incontrovertible evidence from members and Congress, and the 2023 Plan could not be understood as anything other than a deliberate effort to dilute votes based on race,” the committee wrote. “We have concluded that if this record does not rebut a strong presumption of legislative integrity, we doubt that the presumption is rebuttable.”
But the Supreme Court said the panel incorrectly interpreted Alabama’s consent to the lower court’s original ruling on the map as evidence of discriminatory intent.
The majority also said the commission should not have blocked the map right before the election because states “are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute electoral changes are in their own interest.”
In a dissenting opinion joined by two liberal colleagues, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority’s decision “upends an entire election in Alabama and undermines our democratic process in the name of recognizing discrimination against black Alabamians in Alabama.”
Intentional discrimination is a new standard set by the Supreme Court in its April decision in Louisiana v. Calais to assess whether racial minorities’ voting rights are being unfairly restricted.
The Trump administration supported Alabama’s argument that the Supreme Court should intervene because the lower court’s decision contradicts Louisiana v. Calais.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said the three-judge panel was nervous about finding racial bias while ignoring “many legal explanations” for district lines, including keeping similar communities together in the same district and not requiring two incumbents to run against each other.
“Mr. Curry justified Alabama’s position,” Marshall wrote in the state’s emergency appeal, “yet in one week the district court ruled that Mr. Curry did not change anything.”
Voting Rights Act ruling sets off battle
The Voting Rights Act “requires strong evidence of intentional discrimination,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a majority opinion that held up Louisiana’s map for relying too much on race to classify voters. He said it was not enough that maps “failed to provide a sufficient number of majority and minority areas.”
A new interpretation of the Voting Rights Act forced several Southern states to redraw their congressional maps to eliminate minority-heavy districts, even though voting for this year’s candidates had already begun.
After issuing its decision, the court rushed to finalize the decision so that Louisiana could quickly impose new maps.
The justices then directed Alabama’s three-judge panel to reconsider its 2025 rejection of the Republican-preferred map, resulting in a new rejection in May and the state immediately appealing to the high court.
Kristen Clark, general counsel for the NAACP, said in a statement that the Supreme Court “is stripping black voters of their power and voice at a rate that would put even Jim Crow jurists to shame.”
Alabama’s map has been controversial for years.
Alabama’s maps have been in dispute since the 2020 Census, when the Alabama Legislature drew new boundaries that included one of seven districts with a majority of Black voters. African Americans make up more than a quarter of the state’s total population.
In 2023, the Supreme Court unexpectedly ruled against the state, striking down the map as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. The maps passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in response to that decision are the subject of the latest ruling.
Other Supreme Court redistricting decisions
In other redistricting decisions this year unrelated to the Voting Rights Act, the court allowed Texas to use a map drawn to give Republicans up to five additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The justices also allowed California to use a map that could send five more Democrats to Congress.
The court declined to intervene after the Virginia Supreme Court blocked the creation of new maps aimed at electing four more Democrats from the state.
