“We see no reason to disturb the District Court’s careful factual findings,” Roberts wrote, adding that Alabama was asking for a radical rewrite of the court’s precedents.
Thursday’s ruling upholds a decision by a three-judge panel that threw out Alabama’s new congressional map, which included only one congressional district with a majority of Black voters even though African Americans make up more than a quarter of the state’s population.
It was a surprise from a court whose conservative majority had signaled it was suspicious of the Voting Rights Act that Alabama was challenging, which the state said requires legislatures to prioritize race over traditional redistricting techniques.
Thursday’s opinion in effect preserves the status quo in the court’s interpretation of voting rights protections, and Roberts acknowledged concerns that those rulings “may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the States.”
“Our opinion today does not diminish or disregard these concerns,” he wrote. “It simply holds that a faithful application of our precedents and a fair reading of the record before us do not bear them out here.”
Still, there was joy among civil rights groups, which had braced for another defeat at the court.
This decision is a crucial win against the continued onslaught of attacks on voting rights,” said Legal Defense Fund senior counsel Deuel Ross, who argued the case before the court in October. “Alabama attempted to rewrite federal law by saying race had no place in redistricting. But because of the state’s sordid and well-documented history of racial discrimination, race must be used to remedy that past and ensure communities of color are not boxed out of the electoral process.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland said the decision “preserves the principle that in the United States, all eligible voters must be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote free from discrimination based on their race.”
Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a voting rights expert at Harvard Law School, called the decision “an absolutely stunning development” based on the court’s recent decisions.
The ruling drew a sharp rebuke from Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote that the question is whether the Voting Rights Act “requires the State of Alabama to intentionally redraw its longstanding congressional districts so that black voters can control a number of seats roughly proportional to the black share of the State’s population.”
The law, he said, “demands no such thing, and, if it did, the Constitution would not permit it.”
Thomas was joined in part by Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.
Those four, plus Kavanaugh, had earlier put the lower court’s decision on hold. Because of that, Alabama conducted the 2022 elections using its newly drawn maps. The result was one congressional district of seven is held by a Black Democrat. The rest are held by six White Republicans.
The state was challenging a unanimous decision by a three-judge panel that said the Voting Rights Act required Alabama to create a second congressional district, out of seven, in which an African American candidate would have a good chance of being elected. Alabama’s electorate is 27 percent Black. Those who sued the state alleged that many of those voters are illegally packed into one district, with the rest spread among others so that their voting power is diluted.
Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature redrew the state’s congressional map in 2021 to take account of the 2020 census. It maintained a single district in which Black voters make up a majority. That district has long elected a Democrat, while the state’s other six districts are represented by Republicans.
The three lower-court judges who ruled against Alabama — two of them nominated by President Donald Trump — were applying Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which forbids practices that would mean racial minorities “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” The judges concluded Alabama lawmakers should have drawn a second district “in which Black voters either comprise a voting-age majority or something quite close to it.”
The case is the first for current Supreme Court justices to consider how to apply the Voting Rights Act to districts drawn with racial representation in mind. In 2019, the court said federal courts had no role in policing partisan — as opposed to racial — gerrymandering.
To challenge a redistricting map, plaintiffs must show that there is a minority community large and compact enough to warrant a district. Then it must show racially polarized voting patterns. The panel of judges in the case at issue said it was not a “close call”: “Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress.”
But the Supreme Court on a 5-4 vote last year put the panel’s ruling on hold, meaning the fall elections took place under the plan drawn by the state’s Republican-led legislature, with familiar results.
The fight centers on what is called the state’s Black Belt, which is named for its fertile black soil but also is a swath in which many of the state’s Black voters live. The challengers’ maps would remove some of those voters from the district that now routinely elects a Black congresswoman and create a second district in which a Black candidate would have a much greater chance.
But Alabama said that redrawing could only happen by splitting the counties along the state’s Gulf Coast, which the state contends is a unified community of shared interest because of combined French and Spanish heritage. At oral argument, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that the state had never been reluctant to split Black voters, who she said also had shared interests.
In another Alabama case in 2013, Shelby County v. Holder, the court dramatically weakened Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required federal approval of changes to voting procedures in places with a history of discrimination. In 2021, the justices limited the ability to challenge voting restrictions opposed by minorities in a case from Arizona called Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee.
The current case is is Allen v. Milligan.
This is a developing story. It will be updated.
