Supreme Court Reaffirms Minority Voting Rights by Overturning Alabama Republicans' Redesign

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the redrawing of electoral districts approved by Alabama's Republican authorities in 2021, a ruling that strengthens the voting rights of minorities in the face of partisan political maneuvering and endorses the historic Voting Rights Act passed during the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

The court (which has a conservative majority of six justices to three progressives) found by five votes in favor and four against that the new map, designed after the 2020 census, violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, which prohibits electoral practices that deny or restrict the right to vote on the basis of race. as ruled by a lower court.

The reapportionment of Alabama's seven seats in the House of Representatives created a single, majority-black district, despite the fact that 27% of the state's population is black.

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The president of the Supreme Court, the conservative John Roberts, said that "the heart of this case is not the law as it exists: it is Alabama's attempt to remake our jurisprudence," according to the specialized media Scotusblog. The vote of Roberts, who wrote the ruling, was joined by the also conservative Brett Kavanaugh, in addition to the three progressive justices.

The case reached the Supreme Court after a three-judge panel of a federal court ruled in January 2022 that the map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and gave the state two weeks to craft a new one that included a second majority-black district.

State authorities appealed an emergency to the Supreme Court, which allowed the map to remain in effect until its final ruling was made public. The map, now annulled, was used in the November 2022 midterm elections.

Overturning decades of precedent

The plaintiffs, a group of registered voters in Alabama, and the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, argued their opposition to the state's interpretation of Section 2, which believes that current enforcement requires states to prioritize race over other criteria of neutrality when drawing new districts.

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According to them, that view would "nullify decades of precedents established" by the Voting Rights Act and "rewrite" Section 2, according to the specialized media Scotusblog.com.

But state Attorney General Edmund LaCour argued that the lower court's ruling was incorrect because it forced Alabama to consider race above traditional, racially neutral criteria.

In his view, such a reading would violate the Constitution because it would imply "racial goals" and a "race-based classification" that would violate the Fourteenth Amendment (which states that all people born in the United States are citizens of the country regardless of their race, ethnicity, and origin of their parents), and the Fifteenth Amendment (which guarantees the right to vote for all U.S. citizens regardless of race). color, or prior condition of servitude).

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LaCour also said that to create a second minority majority district, plaintiffs would first have to show it can be done without regard to race.

Computer simulations using race-neutral criteria never yielded a map with a second majority-black district, he said.

Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts raised eyebrows during oral arguments by joining the three liberal justices, noting that the lower court "correctly applied existing law in a broad opinion with no apparent errors to our correctness."

Justice Samuel Alito, one of the most conservative on the Supreme Court, supported the state of Alabama by asking several times how to create a second majority-black district "if you can't get that map with a computer simulation that takes into account all the traditional factors of racial neutrality," according to the British newspaper The Guardian.