October 5th 2023.
A federal court ruled on Thursday that Alabama must implement a new congressional map, which is expected to give Democrats an additional seat in the closely divided US House of Representatives during the 2024 election.
The three-judge panel selected a map that preserves the state's only majority-Black district while creating a second district in which Black voters make up nearly half of the voting-age population. This decision comes after the court found, for the second time, that congressional lines drawn by the Republican-dominated state legislature likely violated the Voting Rights Act by illegally diluting Black votes.
Democrats are looking to flip five seats in the 435-seat House of Representatives to take back the majority in the November 2024 election. In Alabama, more than a quarter of residents are Black, however the Republican-backed plans only included one district where Black voters made up a majority or close to it. This district, the 7th, is represented by the state's lone Democrat, Terri Sewell, a Black woman.
Civil rights groups challenged the Republican map, arguing that Republicans had deliberately spread Black voters thin to ensure they would continue to win six of the state's seven districts. The US Supreme Court twice declined to overturn the panel's conclusions that the Republican plans were unlawful.
"It did not have to be this way," the panel wrote in its decision on Thursday. "And it would not have been this way if the legislature had created a second opportunity district or majority-minority district."
Similar challenges are also pending in Louisiana and Georgia, where civil rights groups have argued that Republican lawmakers illegally disadvantaged Black voters by manipulating congressional lines. For the Alabama case, the panel consisted of two judges appointed by former President Donald Trump and a third appointed by former President Ronald Reagan and elevated to the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals by former President Bill Clinton.
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