Alabama’s congressional map at stake in federal Voting Rights Act trial
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama’s congressional map is at stake in a federal trial beginning Monday to decide if the state will keep the new court-created district that led to the election of a second Black representative.
A three-judge panel will decide whether congressional lines drawn by state lawmakers diluted the voting power of Black residents. The same panel already ruled against Alabama in pre-trial decisions that reshaped the 2nd Congressional District before Rep. Shomari Figures won election in November, giving Alabama two Black representatives in its delegation for the first time in history.
Alabama is seeking to reinstate state-drawn maps. The plaintiffs hope to make the court-ordered map permanent. The trial is expected to last at least two weeks.
“This case is about representation. We have a voice right now. We were able to exercise our right to vote to achieve that. We are hoping that the court-ordered map will be able to stay in place,” plaintiff Shalela Dowdy said.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said Alabama will show the state-drawn map complied with the law.
“The previous hearings in this case involved only preliminary assessments on an extremely expedited timeline,” Marshall said.
Marshall noted the state’s defeat of a separate legal challenge, which alleged that Alabama’s system of electing appellate judges statewide disenfranchises Black Alabamians. The state successfully argued that political party, not race, has determined who wins court races.
“We will show in the coming weeks that Alabama’s congressional redistricting plan is lawful, whether or not it favors Democrats as much as plaintiffs would prefer,” Marshall said.
Since the state’s white voters overwhelmingly choose Republicans, the congressional lines have historically disadvantaged Democrats who depend on Black votes.
The long-running case began in 2021 when Black voters and civil rights groups filed lawsuits over Alabama’s congressional map they said disenfranchised Black voters.
African Americans account for about 27% of the state’s population but were the majority in just one of the state’s seven congressional districts. The lawsuits accuse Alabama lawmakers of violating the Voting Rights Act 1965 by packing Black voters into a single majority-Black district and splintering other Black communities to limit their influence in other districts. Each of the seven districts represents about 14% of the state’s citizens.
The three-judge panel in 2022 concluded the map did likely violate the Voting Rights Act, and ordered the state to create a second majority-Black district or something close it.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed in a surprise 5-4 ruling in 2023. Alabama lawmakers then drew new lines that the panel said flouted their instruction. The court instead selected a new map drawn by a court-appointed expert that altered the bounds southeast Alabama’s District 2, stretching it westward across the state to the Mississippi border and increasing its Black voting-age population to 48.7%.
Deuel Ross, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who represents plaintiffs, said it is disappointing that Alabama is continuing to fight the case when there is “a map that’s already in place, a member of Congress that’s already elected.”
“This sort of recalcitrance is a throwback to an earlier unfortunate era of Alabama history. It’s also, frankly, a waste of the state’s resources,” Ross said.
Ross said plaintiffs believe they can show a level of continuing, intentional discrimination that should once again make Alabama subject to the preclearance requirement of the 1965 law.
″This is sort of exactly the thing that Alabama and other states did before the Voting Rights Act — a court would find that there was some sort of discrimination in the way in which they were drawing maps or registering voters and the state would respond by essentially doing the same thing over again, but dressing it up in a slightly different outfit,” Ross said.
Figures said the case has been about securing fair representation.
“The preliminary rulings — including from the U.S. Supreme Court — have validated the fact that congressional districts were likely drawn in a way that did not allow for Black people in Alabama to have fair representation in Congress,” Figures said.
By KIM CHANDLER
Associated Press
