Alabama ‘purposely’ diluted Black votes with congressional plan, court finds

A federal court ruled Thursday 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.

A federal court ruled Thursday 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. With the finding, the court said it would consider whether to put Alabama under a Voting Rights Act provision that would require it to get federal approval of its congressional plans going forward. The three-judge panel – made up of a former President Bill Clinton-appointee and two appointees of President Donald Trump – said that its conclusion that Alabama was acting with a discriminatory intent was “unusual” but not a “particularly close call.” “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,” the court said. 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.