SCOTUS Alabama ruling upholds voting rights in surprise decision

The Supreme Court issued an unexpected decision on Thursday, ordering Alabama to redraw its congressional voting maps that had diluted the voice of Black voters. In a 5-4 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—to affirm the Voting Rights Act.

The case originated in 2020 when the Republican-controlled Alabama legislature redrew the lines around its seven congressional districts. The new voting map resulted in just one of the seven districts, or 14%, being primarily composed of Black voters, despite Alabama’s voting-age population being 27% Black. That single district is represented by a Democrat, while the other six elected Republicans in the 2022 election.

Black voters and advocacy groups argued that this map violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark piece of civil rights legislation that safeguards voting rights for racial minorities. In early 2022, a district court ruled that Alabama should have created two congressional districts with a large population of Black voters, rather than just one. The panel asserted that Alabama had diluted the political power of Black voters by packing them into a single district and scattering the rest across the other six.

Thursday’s ruling affirms the lower court’s conclusion that the congressional district map violates the Voting Rights Act. In his majority opinion, Roberts wrote, “A district is not equally open, in other words, when minority voters face—unlike their majority peers—bloc voting along racial lines, arising against the backdrop of substantial racial discrimination within the State, that renders a minority vote unequal to a vote by a nonminority voter.” 

“We see no reason to disturb the District Court’s careful factual findings,” Roberts added.

This case on redistricting and its effects on the political participation of minority communities is one of many playing out across the country, and the decision has set a standard for other states.

In an interview with CNN, Democratic representative Terri Sewell, Alabama’s first Black woman elected to Congress, said, “Everyone’s looking at this decision and I think that it will have a ripple effect, a positive ripple effect. It means that minority dilution is not going to be tolerated by the Supreme Court or by any court in the land, and that is a huge victory.”