Federal Court Rules Alabama’s Racist Voting Map Dilutes Black Voting Power…Again

As much as Republicans, especially in the MAGA era, fearmonger about election security and voter fraud that largely does not exist in the U.S., the true threat to American voters that we really don’t discuss enough is the years-long trend of red states redistricting their congressional maps with the clear intent — and often the expressed purpose — of diluting Black voting power. It’s a strategy that has already worked in Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana, where the Republican-led Supreme Court has allowed state legislators to reduce the number of predominantly Black voting districts in their states, typically, to a number that fails to represent the state’s Black population.

In Alabama, Republican leaders have fought court orders to draw a second predominantly Black voting district for years. On Thursday, a federal court, once again, ruled that Alabama “engaged in intentional discrimination when it refused to draw a congressional plan with a second Black majority district after courts, including the Supreme Court, repeatedly rejected maps with just one such district,” CNN reported.

“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,” said a three-judge panel that consisted of one President Bill Clinton appointee and two judges appointed by none other than President Donald Trump (in case any MAGA rubes are reading this, ready to start blustering about liberal commie “woke” judges that hate the orange messiah).

So, now, the federal court will determine whether to put Alabama under a Voting Rights Act provision that would require it to get federal approval of its congressional map for all elections going forward.

From CNN:

The legal war over Alabama’s congressional map has waged for nearly half a decade. The 2020 redistricting cycle was the first since the passage of the Voting Rights Act that Alabama and other states in the South were not required to get so-called “preclearance” for the maps. A 2013 Supreme Court ruling that gutted the part of the law that required states with a history of racial discrimination in their voting practices to get changes to their election policies approved by the Justice Department or a federal court.

The preclearance provision in play now in the case is a separate one, known as Section 3. Under it, states and jurisdictions can be forced to get federal approval for election policies because they’ve intentionally discriminated against voters of color.

The congressional plan Alabama drew after the 2020 census made six out of the seven districts majority White, even though 27% of the state’s population is Black. The Supreme Court allowed the plan to be used in the 2022 election, but then affirmed the findings by lower courts that the map had the effect of unlawfully diluting Black votes.

Yet the legislature, given the opportunity to redraw the map, refused to enact a plan that included a second congressional district that would allow Black voters to elect the candidate choice, sticking instead to a map that had only one majority-Black district.

A court-appointed expert drew a temporary map for the 2024 election, and, for the first time in 150 years, Alabama elected two Black people to its congressional delegation that year.

In case you didn’t catch that, in 2022, the Republican-led Supreme Court basically told Alabama, “OK, your little congressional callback to Jim Crow can still serve as a shining example of systemic racism through these upcoming mid-terms, but after that, you’re really going to have to chill with all this segregation stuff.” And, of course, Alabama leaders still refused to change the state’s map until their hands were forced, and voila, white legislators ended up with more than one Black coworker for the first time in a century and a half. 

Yet, in 2025, federal judges are still having to remind state legislators in Alabama that the civil rights era changed a few things for Black voters. 

It just goes to show that while Republicans claim diversity initiatives are obsolete because they at least pretend to believe we’re living in a post-racial America, their own actions reveal that, if left to its own devices, America will default back to anti-Black discrimination every time.

Sad.

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