Alabama lawmakers clash over Black voters as redistricting deadline looms

By Joseph Ax

(Reuters) – Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature faced a Friday deadline to approve a new congressional map that would boost the number of Black voters in one of the state’s districts after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that its current map was unconstitutional and violated the Voting Rights Act.

But Democrats and civil rights groups argued that the proposals in the state’s Republican-dominated House of Representatives and state Senate both fell far short of complying with the court order to protect minority voters’ rights, in keeping with the bedrock 1965 law.

The legislature convened a special session this week to enact a revised map, after the Supreme Court in June upheld a lower court finding that the previous Republican-drawn map illegally diluted the voting power of Black residents.

That map was in place for the 2022 midterm elections, when Republicans won a narrow 222-213 majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. Adding another majority-Black district would increase Democrats’ chances of picking up another seat in the 2024 elections.

Alabama’s state House and Senate – both about three-quarters Republican – passed dueling maps on Wednesday and must decide which version to advance by day’s end.

The plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case have already vowed to challenge either map in court, saying both would still violate the law.

“Alabama lawmakers appear hell-bent on preventing Black voters from fully participating in the democratic process and they are blatantly ignoring their constituents, federal law, and the highest court of the land to disenfranchise us,” one plaintiff, Scott Douglas, the executive director at Greater Birmingham Ministries, said in a statement.

Alabama’s population is more than one-quarter Black, but only one of the state’s seven congressional districts, the 7th, is majority Black. The state’s lone Democratic U.S. House member, Terri Sewell, represents that district.

In 2022, a three-judge panel in a federal district court invalidated the current map as unlawful. After the Supreme Court agreed, the panel ordered the legislature to produce an updated plan by Friday that included two districts with either a Black majority or “something quite close.”

Lawmakers spent much of the week debating the meaning of those words. The two maps advanced by Republicans would retain the 7th district as the state’s lone majority-Black district while raising the percentage of voting-age Black residents in the 2nd district from about 31% to either 38% or 42%.

Republican leaders have said they believe the new 2nd district, under either plan, would have a large enough Black population to comply with the court’s directive.

Black Democratic lawmakers have called the maps a slap in the face to Black voters – and to the courts.

“It is an embarrassment,” said Juandalynn Givan, a Jefferson County legislator, adding that the Republican plan amounted to dropping “an F-bomb on the United States Supreme Court.”

Michael Li, a redistricting expert with New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, said the proposed maps’ allotment is not close enough to a majority to give Black voters a chance to pick their representative.

“There certainly are places in the country where a 42% Black district would elect a Black-preferred candidate,” Li said. “But that’s not in Alabama, given the stark racially polarized voting that exists in the state.”

Whatever map passes the legislature would require approval from the same federal three-judge panel. If the court determines that the new map is still illegal, a court-appointed special master would draw a new version to be used in the 2024 congressional election.

Last week, a New York state appeals court ordered lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional map. The decision, opposed by Republicans, could give the Democratic-controlled legislature a chance to flip as many as half a dozen Republican-held U.S. House seats by enacting a partisan plan.

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