Two decades ago, a lawsuit forced the creation of the Seventh Congressional District, the state’s sole majority Black district, in southwest Alabama. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta.)įor Alabama, the ruling caps off nearly two years of litigation, marking yet another instance in the state’s tumultuous history where a court has forced officials to follow federal civil rights and voting laws. Moorer, both named to their posts by former President Donald J. The decision was joined by Judge Stanley Marcus, who was nominated by former President Bill Clinton and by Judges Anna M. Lawyers for the state also asked the court to halt its own order and allow the 2023 map to be used during the appeal, arguing that without doing so, “the state will be compelled to cede its sovereign redistricting power to the court so that Alabamians can be segregated into different districts based on race.”Īt least one nonpartisan political analysis has predicted that at least one Alabama district could become an election tossup with a new map, given that Black voters in Alabama tend to vote for Democratic candidates. Supreme Court,” the office said in a statement. “While we are disappointed in today’s decision, we strongly believe that the Legislature’s map complies with the Voting Rights Act and the recent decision of the U.S. The Alabama attorney general’s office appealed the ruling on Tuesday evening.
“What happened in Alabama this summer underscores the necessity for the judiciary to continue to be unwavering in its obligations to enforce the critical protections of the Voting Rights Act,” said Eric Holder, the former attorney general and head of the National Redistricting Foundation, the Democratic group that has backed several voting rights-based map challenges, including the one in Alabama. Prominent lawmakers in Washington - including Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California and Democrats in the Congressional Black Caucus - have kept careful tabs on the redistricting effort. House of Representatives rests on a thin margin. The litigation has been closely watched in Washington and across the country, as several other states in the South face similar voting rights challenges, and control of the U.S. State officials have said that a new congressional map needs to be in place by early October, in order to prepare for the 2024 elections. Responsibility for a new map now falls to a special master, Richard Allen, a longtime Alabama lawyer who has worked under several Republican attorneys general, and a cartographer, David Ely, a demographer based in California. “The law requires the creation of an additional district that affords Black Alabamians, like everyone else, a fair and reasonable opportunity to elect candidates of their choice,” the judges wrote. In its new ruling, the three-judge panel in Alabama found that the Legislature had flouted its mandate under the court’s ruling. The revised map, approved over the objections of Democrats, increased the percentage of Black voters in one of the state’s six majority white congressional districts to about 40 percent, from about 30 percent. The Legislature had hastily pushed through a revised map in July after a surprise Supreme Court ruling found that Alabama’s existing map violated a landmark civil rights law by undercutting the power of the state’s Black voters. In a sharp rebuke, the judges ordered that the new map be independently drawn, taking the responsibility away from the Republican-controlled Legislature while chastising state officials who “ultimately did not even nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy.” A panel of federal judges rejected Alabama’s latest congressional map on Tuesday, ruling that a new map needed to be drawn because Republican lawmakers had failed to comply with orders to create a second majority Black district or something “close to it.”
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