A Rare Win for Voting Rights at the Supreme Court - Ms. Magazine

with Black voters, ordering Alabama to redraw its map to create two districts “where Black voters either comprise a voting-age majority or something quite close to it.”

Alabama appealed, claiming that it could not create a second Black district without violating lawmakers’ stated policy preference for changing districts as little as possible in redistricting, including making sure counties along the state’s Gulf Coast were kept whole within the same district. It also urged the high court to throw out long-established precedents and adopt a “race-neutral benchmark” for judging what the appropriate number of minority districts should be.

Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal justices, forcefullywhat they described as “Alabama’s attempt to remake our §2 jurisprudence anew.” Under Alabama’s approach, the court said “a State could immunize from challenge a new racially discriminatory redistricting plan simply by claiming that it resembled an old racially discriminatory plan.”

The Court also noted that evidence in the case did not establish that keeping Gulf Coast counties together should be a higher priority than keeping the Black Belt together, describing the region as a community of interest with “a high proportion of black voters who ‘share a rural geography, concentrated poverty, unequal access to government services, … lack of adequate healthcare,’ and a lineal connection to ‘the many enslaved people brought there to work in the antebellum period.

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