A three-judge federal court on Tuesday barred Alabama from using its Republican-drawn congressional map in this year’s elections, ruling that the map intentionally discriminated against Black voters — a conclusion the panel reached even after a recent US Supreme Court decision that made such claims significantly harder to win.

The court ordered Secretary of State Wes Allen to administer the rest of Alabama’s 2026 congressional elections using a court-drawn, race-blind map, the same one Alabama used in the 2024 election and under which voters have already cast ballots in this year’s primaries. Switching maps now, the judges said, would risk disrupting elections already under way. The order will expire if the Legislature passes a new plan.

“We cannot see our way clear to requiring Alabamians to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” the judges wrote.

The ruling is among the first to apply a tougher standard the Supreme Court announced last month in Louisiana v. Callais, which overhauled the decades-old framework for evaluating Voting Rights Act claims. The justices had thrown out the panel’s earlier ruling against the Alabama map and sent the case back for reconsideration. After taking another look, the panel said its conclusion was unchanged: “We again cannot understand the 2023 Plan as anything other than intentionally discriminatory.”

The dispute dates to Alabama’s redistricting after the 2020 census, which produced a map with only one majority-Black district even though Black residents make up more than a quarter of the state’s population. After the Supreme Court affirmed in 2023 that the original map likely violated the Voting Rights Act, the Legislature passed a replacement that again drew just one majority-Black district. The state conceded the new plan did not add a second district where Black voters could elect their preferred candidate.

Those two choices are connected. The Black Belt — a rural band of central Alabama named for its dark soil and home to a large share of the state’s Black residents — is too sparsely populated to form a congressional district on its own. The most direct way to draw a second district where Black voters could elect their preferred candidate is to pair Black Belt counties with the sizable Black population of Mobile, on the Gulf Coast. By keeping Mobile bundled with heavily white Baldwin County in one coastal district, the Legislature’s map removed that building block, leaving Black Belt voters split among majority-white districts.

The court found that the refusal, paired with a series of “highly unusual steps” pointed to the conclusion that the map was designed “to distribute Black voters across districts to dilute their votes, at least in part because they are Black.”

These steps included eight pages of “legislative findings” that lawmakers bolted onto the 2023 map, something the court said Alabama had never done in any previous redistricting bill. The findings declared it “non-negotiable” to keep the Gulf Coast counties together, cementing the arrangement that foreclosed a second Black district, yet pointedly declined to make the non-dilution of Black voting strength non-negotiable, quietly dropping that protection from the Legislature’s own longstanding guidelines even though vote dilution was the entire reason the session was being held. The findings devoted several pages to the Gulf Coast and its “French and Spanish colonial heritage” but described the heavily Black Black Belt in a few short sentences, and deleted language the state had earlier agreed to acknowledging that the region’s Black population descends from people enslaved there. And though the map existed only because the courts had ordered a second district where Black voters could elect their candidate of choice, the findings said nothing about such a district at all.

Alabama had argued that partisanship, not race, explained the map. But the panel said the record contained “zero evidence” of a partisan motive. It found that voting in the state remains driven by race rather than party, citing evidence that Black Alabamians hold conservative views on issues such as abortion yet vote overwhelmingly Democratic. “[I]f party politics drove voting patterns in Alabama,” the court wrote, “it is unclear why Black voters don’t support the party that aligns more closely with their values.”

Allen, who has taken each of the prior injunctions to the Supreme Court, has already appealed.

A three-judge panel on Tuesday blocked a Republican-drawn congressional map in Alabama from going into effect, writing that the district lines “intentionally discriminated based on race in violation of the Constitution.”

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“We cannot see our way clear to requiring Alabamians to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” the panel of federal judges wrote.

The decision is a setback for Republicans, who sought to enact the map after a major redistricting ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court last month. The map would eliminate one of Alabama’s two majority-minority districts, putting the GOP in position to gain a seat in this year’s midterm elections.

Alabama is expected to appeal the ruling. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey scheduled a second primary date in August for the districts affected by the Republican-drawn map. Other primaries were were held in the state on May 19.

“The Legislature well knew that a plan without an additional Black-opportunity district would dilute Black Alabamians’ opportunity to participate in the political process, and it intentionally enacted that very plan,” the panel wrote. “Further, the Legislature well knew what dilutive mechanisms would prevent Black voters in Alabama’s Black Belt and Gulf Coast communities from having any opportunity to elect representatives of their choice, and the Legislature employed precisely those mechanisms.”

The state has spent years feuding with the courts over its congressional map.

The 2023 map was drawn by Republican legislators who defied a federal court’s order — which was affirmed by the Supreme Court — to create two districts in which Black voters make up voting-age majorities, “or something quite close to it.”

Alabama Republicans instead chose to pass a new map with just one majority-Black seat and a second district that is approximately 40% Black. In response, the court put its own map in place, which was used in the 2024 election.

Alabama is one of several GOP-led states in the South that have rushed to attempt to implement new congressional maps for the mditerms after the Supreme Court gutted a key section of the Voting Right Act, paving the way for the elimination of majority-minority districts represented by Democrats.