US Supreme Court rules in favour of Alabama Black voters
The court ruled that the Republican redistribution violated the provisions of the Voting Rights Act against racial discrimination.
The conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court has sided with black voters in a surprising ruling that alleged a Republican-drawn Alabama district map was discriminatory.
In a 5-4 ruling, the court said the congressional map — which had only one majority of black congressional districts out of seven, in a state where more than one in four residents is black — likely violated historic civil rights-era voting rights. Action.
The case was closely watched because of its potential to further weaken the Voting Rights Act, which was passed in 1965 and sought to prevent Jim Crow-era racial discrimination in voting in the US. Several Supreme Court rulings in recent years have swept the legislation, most notably a 2013 decision that blocked a provision of the law requiring states with a history of discriminatory voting practices to face federal review of new laws and procedures.
On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union hailed the latest ruling as a “massive victory for black voters in Alabama,” saying the disputed map had “weakened black political power.”
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s liberals in the majority decision.
BREAKING: The Supreme Court just ruled that Alabama’s 2021 congressional map violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because it diluted black political power.
Alabama must now redraw its congressional map.
— ACLU (@ACLU) June 8, 2023
In lower courts, challengers to the map of Alabama argued that the constitution reduced black voter influence by concentrating their voting rights in one district, while dividing the rest of the black population into levels too small to support a majority. form other districts.
They accused the card of violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a provision aimed at countering measures that lead to racial bias in voting, even when there is no racist intent. Indeed, according to the Supreme Court ruling, Alabama’s black population is large enough and geographically compact enough to warrant a second district.
The state of Alabama, which appealed the lower court ruling, had argued that drawing a second district to give black voters a better chance of choosing their preferred candidates would be racially discriminatory in itself.
They argued that a second district would favor them at the expense of other voters, and called the current map “race neutral”.
During Supreme Court arguments in October, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argued against the idea that race should not be part of the redistribution equation.
She argued that post-Civil War amendments to the U.S. Constitution created a legal basis for legislation “designed to equate people with fewer opportunities and fewer rights with white citizens.”
Party politics, however, support the redistribution issue. US states redraw their congressional districts to reflect changing populations every decade. In most states, that redistribution is done by the party in power at the time, which regularly leads to accusations of map manipulation for partisan gain.
The Alabama state legislature is dominated by Republicans. Creating a new district with a large — if not majority — black population could lead the state to send a second Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives.