In a Tuesday night per curiam order, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of the State of Alabama, allowing them to proceed with using maps drawn in 2023 for the 2026 midterm elections. These maps included only one majority-minority district.
In a lower court ruling, a three-judge panel ordered the state to implement a second majority-minority district under the claim that the 2023 maps violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). On May 11, SCOTUS vacated that ruling and sent it back to the lower court. On May 26, this same three-judge panel once again blocked the use of 2023 maps on the same basis of violation of the VRA, without any consideration of the decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which held that maps drawn along racial lines under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act were no longer valid.
Alabama immediately filed an emergency petition to SCOTUS, which brings us to here.
Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney-Barrett ruled in favor of the state. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
In the order, the court noted Alabama showed it was entitled to interim relief from the district court’s injunction and that the state would have likely succeeded with its appeals. It dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims of “intentional vote dilution,” stating, “the District Court did not heed the presumption of legislative good faith, see Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, 602 U. S. 1, 10 (2024), because it interpreted the State’s legal disagreement with the court’s earlier remedial order as proof of discriminatory animus.”