A federal judge will appoint a special master to redraw Alabama’s congressional map after state lawmakers submitted a second redrawn map that, once again, didn’t follow Supreme Court orders to strengthen Alabama’s Black and minority voter pool.
The Supreme Court ordered the Alabama Legislature to redraw district lines over the summer after discovering that their newly proposed map contained only one majority-Black district out of seven in a state where approximately 28 percent of the population is Black.
Justices ruled that the map violated the Voting Rights Act and that legislators must “either add an additional majority-Black congressional district or an additional district in which Black voters otherwise have an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.”
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After returning to the drawing board, lawmakers drafted a map that preserved that one majority-Black district while increasing the percentage of Black voters in another district from about 30 percent to 42.5 percent. One lawmaker rationalized that increase by stating that Black voters in that second district now have a better chance to shape the outcome of congressional elections.
A three-judge panel, however, didn’t agree and struck down the map legislators submitted.
The federal judges on the panel stated in their order that they were “deeply troubled that the State enacted a map that the State readily admits does not provide the remedy we said federal law requires.”
“We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature — faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district — responded with a plan that the state…
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