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In 2013, a divided Supreme Court gutted one of the major pillars of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In the 10 years since then, the court has moved even farther to the right. So when the Voting Rights Act came before the Supreme Court again in 2022, it didn’t look good for the law. But then something completely unexpected happened: in a 5-4 decision, two of the conservative justices voted with the 3 liberal justices to preserve the Voting Rights Act. And the effects could be huge.
At stake in the case was the way that Alabama divides up its Congressional districts. Alabama has seven districts, one of which is what’s called a “majority-minority district” in which Black Americans are the majority of the population. In 2022, a group of Black voters sued the state, saying that under the law, Alabama should actually have two majority-minority districts. And the Supreme Court agreed.
The reason this matters to the rest of the country is that Alabama’s not alone — several other states in the south are now vulnerable to similar challenges that would increase the number of majority-minority districts. And especially in a region of the country where voting is racially polarized — where white people overwhelmingly vote Republican and Black people vote Democrat — this decision has the potential to flip multiple Congressional seats in the next election. And in a US House of Representatives where Republicans only hold control by a margin of 10 votes or so, that’s a big deal.
Sources and further reading:
In 2021 every state in the US with more than one Congressional district redrew them. CNN has a great tool that looks at each state’s Congressional district map before and after that redistricting, and tracks how many majority-minority districts each state has: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2022/politics/us-redistricting/georgia-redistricting-map/
FiveThirtyEight has a similar tool: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-2022-maps
Many of those new district maps are under legal challenge. The Brennan Center for Justice has a really thorough roundup of every legal case underway against those maps: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/redistricting-litigation-roundup-0
The Brennan Center also has a great summary of the Alabama case: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/merrill-v-milligan-gerrymandering-supreme-court
A big part of the Alabama case was determining whether drawing a second majority-black district would be easy. The mathematician Moon Duchin wrote a brief report for the court that demonstrates that really succinctly: https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/Duchin_Report.pdf
The Guardian built a cool interactive that shows the gerrymandering in Alabama really well: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jun/08/alabama-discrimination-black-voters-map-supreme-court
Naturally I recommend reading Vox.com’s Ian Millhiser breaking down the Alabama decision: https://www.vox.com/scotus/2023/6/8/23753932/supreme-court-john-roberts-milligan-allen-voting-rights-act-alabama-racial-gerrymandering
And Vox’s Christian Paz on the political implications of the case: https://www.vox.com/voting-rights/23754443/supreme-court-alabama-voting-rights-act-congress-democrats-house-louisiana-south-carolina
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