A three-judge federal court on Tuesday blocked Stopped Alabama from using its Republican-drawn congressional map in this year’s election, ruling that the map intentionally discriminated against black voters — a conclusion the panel also reached after a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that made such claims significantly more difficult to win.
The court ordered Secretary of State Wes Allen to administer Alabama’s remaining 2026 congressional elections using a Court-drawn, race-blind mapthe same one Alabama used in the 2024 election and under which voters already cast ballots in this year’s primary election. Changing the map now, the judges said, carries the risk of disrupting elections that are already underway. The order expires if the Legislature passes a new plan.
“We cannot bring ourselves to require Alabam residents to cast their votes in the 2026 election under a district plan tainted by intentional racial discrimination,” the justices wrote.
The ruling is one of the first to apply a stricter standard that the Supreme Court announced last month Louisiana vs. Callaiswhich overhauled the decades-old framework for evaluating voting rights. The justices had thrown out the panel’s earlier decision against Alabama’s map and sent the case back for reconsideration. After re-examination, the panel came to the unchanged conclusion: “We again cannot understand the 2023 plan as anything other than intentionally discriminatory.”
The dispute goes back to Alabama Redistricting after the 2020 censuswhich created a map with only one majority-black county, even though black residents make up more than a quarter of the state’s population. According to the Supreme Court confirmed in 2023 that the original map likely violates the Voting Rights Actthe legislature passed a Substitute that in turn only attracted a majority black district. The state acknowledged that the new plan does not include a second district in which black voters could elect their preferred candidate.
These two possibilities are related. The Black belt – a rural group in central Alabama called Because of its dark soil and home to a large portion of the state’s black residents, it is too sparsely populated to form its own congressional district. The most direct way to draw a second district where black voters could elect their preferred candidate is to pair the Black Belt counties with Mobile’s sizable black population on the Gulf Coast. By bundling Mobile with heavily white Baldwin County into a coastal county, the Legislature’s map removed that building block, leaving Black Belt voters divided among majority-white counties.
The court found that the refusal, coupled with a series of “highly unusual steps,” suggested that the map was designed to “district black voters in order to dilute their votes, at least in part because they are black.”
Those steps included eight pages of “legislative findings” that lawmakers inserted into the 2023 map, something the court said Alabama had never done in a previous redistricting bill. The findings declared that keeping the Gulf Coast districts together was “non-negotiable,” solidifying the agreement that excluded a second black district. However, it explicitly refused to make non-dilution of Black voter strength non-negotiable and tacitly waived that protection from the Legislature’s longstanding policies, even though vote dilution was the sole reason for holding the session. 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 that the state had previously agreed to acknowledge that the region’s black population is descended from people enslaved there. And although the map only existed because the courts had ordered a second district in which black voters could elect their preferred candidate, the results said nothing at all about such a district.
Alabama had argued that the situation was explained by partisanship, not race. But the panel said the file contained “no evidence” of a partisan motive. It noted that voting in the state is still determined by race, not party, and cited evidence that Alabam’s black residents hold conservative views on issues such as abortion but overwhelmingly vote Democratic. “If party politics have determined voting behavior in Alabama,” the court wrote, “it is unclear why black voters do not support the party that is closer to their values.”
Allen, who filed each of the previous injunctions with the Supreme Court, has already done so Appealed.
