By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -A federal court ruled on Thursday that Alabama’s Republican-led legislature intentionally discriminated against Black voters when it approved a new electoral map in 2023 that only had one majority-Black congressional district.
In a 571-page ruling, a three-judge panel sharply criticized state lawmakers for drawing up a congressional map that mirrored one from 2021 that the judges and the U.S. Supreme Court had already concluded diluted the voting power of Black Alabamians in violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Rather than comply with a court order that the state craft a new map that include at least two majority-Black districts, the panel said the legislature “simply doubled down – it passed another map with only one Black-opportunity district.”
The panel, which included two judges appointed by Republican President Donald Trump, said it was unaware of a state legislature ever having responded to a court order in litigation over electoral maps in such a way.
“The Legislature knew what federal law required and purposefully refused to provide it, in a strategic attempt to checkmate the injunction that ordered it,” the panel wrote.
The judges had previously issued a preliminary injunction blocking Alabama from using that new map defining the boundaries of its seven U.S. House of Representatives districts and subsequently required the state to use a court-approved map that had two Black-majority districts in the 2024 election.
Voters subsequently for the first time in the state’s history picked two Black representatives by re-electing Representative Terri Sewell and voting into office Representative Shomari Figures. Both are Democrats.
Lawyers for Black voters and advocacy groups who challenged Alabama’s map then asked to block the state’s map from being used for the rest of the decade.
U.S. Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, and U.S. District Judges Anna Manasco and Terry Moorer, agreed to do so, saying the map not only still violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act but also the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.
Deuel Ross, a lawyer for the plaintiffs at the Legal Defense Fund, in a statement said the ruling “reaffirms the rule of law and the importance of protecting the fundamental right to vote of Black Alabamians in the Black belt and all Americans.”
A spokesperson for Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican, said his office is reviewing the order, adding that “all options remain on the table.”
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; editing by Diane Craft)
