For five years, Alabama fought to keep a congressional map that federal courts ruled was racially discriminatory. It lost in court repeatedly. It defied the orders anyway. On Monday, with voters already casting absentee ballots for a primary eight days away, the Supreme Court handed Alabama exactly what it had been fighting for.
The unsigned order cleared the state to use the map that lower courts had blocked as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson. She called the order “inappropriate” and said it would cause “only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week.”
How It Started
The dispute traces back to Alabama’s 2021 congressional map, drawn after the 2020 census. A group of Black voters and civil rights organizations sued almost immediately. They argued the map spread Black voters across three congressional districts, leaving them a minority in each, and deliberately diluting their political power.
In June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Allen v. Milligan that Alabama’s map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The court upheld an injunction requiring the state to draw a new map that included a second majority-Black district. It was a significant ruling. Alabama has a Black voting-age population of roughly 27 percent. Under the original map, Black voters held a majority in only one of seven congressional districts.
Alabama’s Response
Alabama drew a new map. It still had only one majority-Black district. For the second time in two years, the state produced a map that federal courts found failed to comply with the law. The district court ordered Alabama to adopt a court-drawn map instead, one that created a majority-Black seat in the 7th Congressional District and a Black-plurality seat in the 2nd Congressional District.
Alabama was heading into the 2026 cycle under that court-ordered map. Then the legal landscape shifted.
What Changed
On April 29, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, significantly weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The decision made it substantially harder for minority voters to challenge maps that dilute their political power in court. Within days, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to lift the injunction that had been keeping its rejected 2023 map off the ballot.
The court agreed Monday. The unsigned order contained no explanation. It came from six justices. Three dissented.
The Timeline Problem
Sotomayor’s dissent pointed to something beyond the legal merits. Alabama’s May 19 primary is days away. Absentee voting is already underway. Changing the congressional map at this stage does not just alter which candidates appear on which ballot. It changes which voters are in which race entirely, with no time to adjust.
“This Court’s finding of racially discriminatory vote dilution is an inextricable, permanent feature of this case,” Sotomayor wrote, “and Alabama’s willful decision to respond by entrenching rather than remedying that dilution is, as the District Court correctly recognized, evidence of discriminatory intent.”
The majority offered no response to that argument. The order simply lifted the injunction.
What It Means
Under the court-ordered map, Alabama was set to have two congressional districts where Black voters held significant influence. Under the map the state will now use, there is one. The practical effect is the likely elimination of a Democratic-leaning seat and the reduction of Black political representation in a state where more than a quarter of the voting-age population is Black.
The Supreme Court found in 2023 that Alabama’s approach violated the law. The state spent three years refusing to comply. Last month the court rewrote the law. This week it cleared the state to proceed with the map it had previously struck down.
The courts kept saying Alabama was wrong. Alabama kept drawing the same map. In the end, Alabama won.