The Supreme Court on Monday cleared a path for Alabama to use a new voting map for the midterm elections, a victory for Republicans and another sign of the significance of the court’s recent decision narrowing the Voting Rights Act.
The justices appeared to splinter along ideological lines in the decision, with the court’s three liberals joined in dissent.
The one-paragraph order involved a pending petition before the court by Alabama lawmakers who had challenged the state’s current congressional map, which includes two majority-Black districts that both elected Democrats to Congress in 2024.
The Supreme Court’s decision will send the case back to a lower court judge to reconsider the legality of the Alabama map in light of the court’s recent decision dealing a blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a landmark civil rights-era law. It raised the bar for bringing legal challenges to voting maps, like one that previously resulted in the current Alabama map.
Alabama officials are likely to point to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling to ask the lower court judge to allow the state to use a congressional map first approved in 2023, but never used in light of subsequent court rulings. That new map would include only one majority-Black district, instead of the two in the current map.
In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the court’s majority had “unceremoniously” discarded a lower-court ruling “without any sound basis for doing so and without regard for the confusion that will surely ensue.” She asserted that the lower court was free to decide whether the recent Voting Rights Act decision had “any bearing” on its analysis or “if its prior reasoning is unaffected by that decision.” She was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
In late April, in a 6-to-3 decision, the justices threw out Louisiana’s current congressional district map, finding that state officials there had improperly used race to draw up a congressional district map that likewise had two majority Black districts.
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The court’s conservative supermajority announced that “vast social change” and improved race relations now called for a higher bar — a strong inference of evidence that lawmakers had intended to racially discriminate, not merely gain a political advantage in drawing up voting districts — to bring challenges under the Voting Rights Act.
With states already engaged in a tit-for-tat redistricting battle across the country, the ruling opened up a new front for lawmakers to re-examine their maps and impose new lines before the 2026 midterm elections. Republicans across the South launched a scramble to carve up Democratic-held districts with a majority of Black voters that had been drawn to comply with a previous interpretation of the Voting Rights Acts and aiming to shore up a political advantage in their bid to hold onto their razor-thin majority in the House.
The day after the Supreme Court ruled in the Louisiana case, Alabama lawmakers asked the justices to step in and clear the lower-court rulings that had resulted in the state’s current map. They separately filed an emergency application on Friday on what the court’s critics call “the shadow docket,” asking the justices to clear the way for lawmakers to jettison the current map.
Lawyers for Alabama officials urged the justices to allow them to reject the current map as a “race-based congressional map” that “segregated more than a million Alabamians into different districts because of their race.”
Monday’s order from the Supreme Court came just over a week before voters are set to go to the polls on May 19 in Alabama for primary elections ahead of the midterms. But Alabama Republicans, aiming to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana, had quickly moved to be prepared in case the courts ruled in their favor and lifted a ban on mid-decade redistricting that was in place until after the 2030 election.
On Friday, Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, signed off on legislation that would allow for new House primaries, should the state be allowed to use a different congressional map.
That map was first approved in 2023, as the legislature faced a court order to draw district lines that allowed for a second majority-Black district or margins “close to it.” The legislature instead passed a map that increased the share of Black voters in one of the state’s six majority-white congressional districts to about 40 percent from about 30 percent.
Later that year, the federal court rejected that map, instead tapping an independent special master to draw a new one. The special master’s map remained in place for the 2024 election, preserving the state’s existing majority-Black district and creating a new majority-Black district that includes the capital city of Montgomery, several counties of the rural Black Belt and part of the city of Mobile along the Gulf Coast.
That new district was flipped by Representative Shomari Figures, a Black Democrat who joined Representative Terri A. Sewell, another Black Democrat, in the House. It was the first time Alabama had sent two Black lawmakers to Congress.
