Alabama officially asked the U.S. Supreme Court this morning to pause a lower court’s ruling from earlier this week that blocked the state from using a racially gerrymandered map for this year’s midterms. 

That ruling, and Alabama’s filing today, essentially pushes the Supreme Court to show whether it will abide by its new Voting Rights Act standard, established in April’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which said that maps can be struck if drawn with racial discrimination intentions.  

The map that Alabama wants to use this year was drawn by a Republican-controlled legislature in 2023 with the intention to discriminate against Black voters, as courts have found, including the Supreme Court itself that year.

In that racially gerrymandered 2023 map, Alabama allowed for only one majority-Black congressional district.

However, shortly after its Callais decision, which severely limited the Voting Rights Act’s protections against minority voter dilution, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama to move forward with the 2023 map anyway, despite the fact that voting in this year’s primaries had already started. 

But, then a three-judge panel federal district court blocked that map on May 26, saying that it was drawn with the intent to rob Black voters of opportunities to elect candidates of their choice – as it had also found in an earlier ruling.  

Alabama asked this morning for the Supreme Court to rule by June 1, if not sooner, on its request to bypass the district court’s ruling so that the state can squeeze in a special election on the racially gerrymandered maps. Justice Clarence Thomas requested a response from Black voters by June 1. 

In its filing, the state argued that its maps do not intentionally discriminate against Black voters. It also argued that the Purcell principle – the legal doctrine that says changes such as redistricting shouldn’t be made close to an election – doesn’t apply to legislatures, which can “bear the responsibility for unintended consequences” among voters.

If the Supreme Court allows, a special election has been scheduled for August 11 – a timeline that state’s elections director Jeff Ellrod calls “aggressive,” given his office will have to reassign voters to the new districts, and reprint and resend out new ballots. 

But if Alabama’s 2023 maps are approved, it would also mean that the Supreme Court won’t even stop gerrymanders where intentional racial discrimination has been documented, as called for in its Callais decision. 

What happened

Republican redistricting efforts in Alabama and South Carolina were blocked Tuesday, stalling President Donald Trump’s mid-decade gerrymandering campaign. South Carolina’s GOP-led state Senate thwarted a plan to cancel an ongoing primary and swap in a new map that would erase the state’s lone Democratic and majority Black district. In Alabama, a panel of federal judges temporarily blocked the state GOP’s proposed map, saying it was “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.”

Who said what

The 12 South Carolina GOP senators who “effectively killed” the Trump-backed gerrymander cited “numerous” concerns, from practical and political to procedural, said The Post and Courier. “Neither my conscience nor my common sense is going to let me stop an election that’s already underway,” state Sen. Richard Cash (R) said before the vote. The “rebuke from fellow Republicans came as a shock to Trump’s political operation,” Politico said. But “even without the extra seat” or two, Republicans “have an overall edge in the redistricting war.”

What next?

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.