The Supreme Court's Alabama congressional redistricting ruling, handed down Tuesday night in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, clears the state's Republican-controlled legislature to use a map that eliminates Alabama's only majority-Black congressional district ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
The order reverses a block imposed by a three-judge federal panel in Montgomery and all but guarantees that Rep. Shomari Figures, the Democrat who currently holds Alabama's 2nd Congressional District, will lose his seat to a reconfigured map that scatters Black voter concentrations across multiple Republican-leaning constituencies. The result: six safe Republican seats and one Democratic-leaning one, compared with the five-to-two split that federal courts had been trying to enforce.
Alabama's Long Fight and the Voting Rights Act
The court's majority held that the district court in Montgomery had misread the Supreme Court's own April 29 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which made it substantially harder for plaintiffs to prevail under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Alabama Republicans argued the revised map was drawn using race-neutral criteria. The Supreme Court's conservative bloc agreed, lifting the injunction that had kept the map from taking effect.
"This ruling takes the already narrowed Section 2 pathway and narrows it further," a senior election law attorney in Washington who has litigated Voting Rights Act cases for two decades said. "Plaintiffs in redistricting cases now face a standard that is measurably harder to meet with each successive decision."
Alabama's redistricting history adds particular weight to the ruling. The state fought a nearly identical battle following the Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Allen v. Milligan, in which the court found Alabama's previous map likely violated Section 2. The Republican legislature responded with a revised map that federal courts again found failed to remedy the underlying violation. Tuesday's order effectively lets Alabama run the 2026 midterms on a map that went through that entire cycle of litigation without ever being used.
A Stinging Dissent
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for herself, Justice Elena Kagan, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, said the majority was "rewarding Alabama's defiance" of multiple court orders. "The court is squarely faced with a record of the turmoil it has caused and the harm it has wrought," Sotomayor wrote. "Yet just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos."
The dissent catalogued what the liberal justices described as deliberate delay — Alabama submitting maps, courts blocking them, the state filing emergency applications upward — that effectively ran out the clock on any remedy that might have delivered Black voters a realistic second congressional seat.
Midterm Consequences Across the South
Analysts at the Cook Political Report reclassified Alabama's 2nd District race from "Lean Democrat" to "Safe Republican" within hours of the ruling. Rep. Figures released a statement from his district office in Mobile calling the decision "a setback for every Black voter in this state" and pledging to campaign regardless of the redrawn lines. "The votes still have to be cast and they still have to be counted," Figures said.
Beyond Alabama, civil rights advocates warned the ruling clears the way for similarly aggressive redistricting maps in Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana ahead of 2028. "If you can run this playbook in Alabama and win," a source close to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund said, "you run it everywhere."
The Roberts Court's record on voting rights has drawn intense scrutiny since Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 gutted the preclearance requirements that once forced states with documented discriminatory histories to seek federal approval before changing election laws. With Section 5 gone, Section 2 became the last structural protection — and Tuesday's decision narrows that tool again.
"We are at the point where the Voting Rights Act exists on paper but is barely operational as a litigation tool," a constitutional law professor at the University of Alabama School of Law said. "Each successive ruling narrows the pathway until it is nearly impassable."
Alabama election officials said redistricting maps will be certified for use by late June. Legal observers expressed skepticism that any further challenge could produce an injunction in time to affect November's races. The window, for all practical purposes, is closed.