The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for Alabama to use a new voting map for the midterm elections, a victory for Republicans and another sign of the importance of the court’s recent ruling limiting the Voting Rights Act.
The justices appeared divided along ideological lines in the decision, with the court’s three liberals also joining in the dissent.
The one-paragraph order included a petition pending before the court by Alabama lawmakers who challenged the state’s current congressional map, which includes two majority-Black districts, both of which elected Democrats to Congress in 2024.
The Supreme Court’s decision will send the case back to a lower court judge to reconsider the validity of the Alabama map, as the court’s recent ruling deals a blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark civil rights-era law. It raised the bar for bringing legal challenges to voting maps, as had previously happened with the current Alabama map.
Alabama officials are likely to point to a recent Supreme Court decision to ask a lower court judge to allow the state to use a congressional map first approved in 2023 but never used in light of subsequent court rulings. That new map would include only one majority-black district instead of two in the current map.
In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the court’s majority had “casually rejected” the lower court’s decision “without any solid basis and certainly without regard to the confusion it might cause.” He stressed that the lower court was free to decide whether the recent Voting Rights Act decision had “any bearing” on its analysis or “whether its prior reasoning is unaffected by that decision.” He was also joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
In late April, in a 6-to-3 decision, the justices threw out Louisiana’s current congressional district map, finding that state officials there had improperly used race to draw the congressional district map, which similarly contained two majority black districts.
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The court’s conservative supermajority declared that a higher standard was now required for “broad social change” and improvement in race relations – a strong finding of evidence that lawmakers intended to racially discriminate, not merely gain political advantage in drawing voting districts – to bring challenges under the Voting Rights Act.
With states across the country already engaged in tit-for-tat redistricting battles, the ruling opens a new front for lawmakers to re-examine their maps and impose new lines ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Republicans across the South began a struggle to carve out Democratic-held districts with majority black voters, which were designed to comply with the previous interpretation of the Voting Rights Act and aimed to gain political advantage in their bid to retain their razor-thin majority in the House.
The day after the Supreme Court’s decision in the Louisiana case, Alabama lawmakers asked the justices to intervene and clean up the lower court rulings that resulted in the state’s current map. They filed a separate emergency application Friday, in what court critics call a “shadow docket,” asking the justices to clear the way for lawmakers to remove the existing map.
Attorneys for the Alabama officials urged the judge to allow them to reject the current map as a “race-based congressional map” that “divides more than a million Alabamians into different districts because of their race.”
Monday’s Supreme Court order comes just a week before Alabama is scheduled to vote on May 19 for primary elections ahead of the midterms. But Alabama Republicans, aiming to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana, quickly prepared in case the courts ruled in their favor and lifted the ban on mid-decade redistricting that had been in place until after the 2030 election.
On Friday, Governor Kay Ivey, a Republican, signed legislation that will allow for new House primaries should the state be allowed to use a different congressional map.
That map was first approved in 2023, as the legislature faced a court order to draw district lines that would allow a second majority black district or “close to it” by the margin. Instead the legislature passed a map that increased the share of black voters in one of the state’s six majority-white congressional districts from about 30 percent to about 40 percent.
Later that year, the federal court rejected that map, instead hiring an independent special master to draw a new map. The special master map remained in place for the 2024 election, preserving the state’s existing majority-Black district and creating a new majority-Black district that includes the capital city of Montgomery, several rural Black Belt counties, and part of the city of Mobile along the Gulf Coast.
That new district was flipped by Representative Shomari Figures, a Black Democrat, who was defeated by another Black Democrat in the House, Representative Terry A. Sewell. This was the first time Alabama sent two black lawmakers to Congress.
