Allen v. Milligan<\/a> redistricting case.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn it, the state\u2019s Republican Party-dominated legislature and governor are defying even the very conservative current Supreme Court, that in June upheld a lower court\u2019s finding that the state\u2019s proposed new Congressional voting districts were unfair to 27% of Alabama\u2019s population, its Black citizens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In fact, the new voting district map the state offered in response to that ruling seems worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis map, and the Republican politicians who supported it, would make George Wallace proud,\u201d former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder told the Alabama Political Reporter. \u201cIt very arrogantly defies a very conservative United States Supreme Court decision from just two weeks ago.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wallace, known for his \u201csegregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever\u201d speech at his 1963 inauguration as Alabama\u2019s governor, was a four-time presidential candidate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Defying SCOTUS<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Redistricting, as the process is called, is routinely done all across the country every 10 years to reflect new data from the most recent Census \u2013 2020\u2019s, in this case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The original January 2022 ruling in Alabama, by a three-judge panel of the federal District Court for Northern Alabama, ordered the state back to the drawing board to reconfigure its newly drawn maps to give Black voters a chance to choose their representatives by having a voting-age majority in at least two of Alabama\u2019s seven Congressional districts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Republicans continue to hold six of Alabama\u2019s seven seats in Congress, because when the Supreme Court agreed in February 2022 to hear an appeal of the District Court\u2019s ruling, it nonetheless allowed the maps in question to stay in place for that year\u2019s elections, with predictable results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later in the year, the Supreme Court also blocked a challenge to new maps in 30% Black Louisiana, where only one of the six Congressional districts have a majority Black voting-age population. This year, the Court reversed itself on June 26 and will let the challenge go forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meanwhile, in the maps Alabama\u2019s legislature and governor arrived at in July, Black voters are in the majority in only one district, the 7th<\/sup>, as has been the case since 1992.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThose maps were presented to Alabama\u2019s District Court on Aug. 14, in response to the High Court\u2019s June 9 decision this year that the lower court had been correct in finding the GOP-led state legislature violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by drawing \u2013 gerrymandering \u2013 the maps in such a way as to deny citizens equal representation at the polls. The High Court gave Alabama until July 21 to revise them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Diluting the Black vote<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
But the new maps, produced just before that deadline, reduce the Black majority in the only district that had one, District 7, from 55% to just over 50%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In District 2, the percentage of Black voters increases from 30% to almost 40%, likely not enough to produce a winning margin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rest of that 27% of the state\u2019s population is divided between the other five districts to comprise less than 20% in each.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Republican Governor Kay Ivey signed off on the proposed new maps immediately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In theory, Alabama\u2019s Black population can reasonably be expected to send two representatives to the U.S. Congress in the state\u2019s seven-seat delegation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Black voters in Alabama are overwhelmingly Democrat-supporting, more than 90% united in their choices and, besides District 7, concentrated in District 2 and its neighboring districts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But candidates who can earn that support win only about 15% of white votes, and \u201cBlack Alabamians enjoy virtually zero success in statewide elections,\u201d the District Court noted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The new maps, redistricting experts say, would fail to meet the court\u2019s requirement that they level the playing field, or even, as the court had ordered, at least come close to doing so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the Aug. 14 hearing to consider those new maps, one of the three judges on the District Court panel, Terry F. Moorer, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, asked if Alabama had chosen to \u201cdeliberately disregard\u201d the court\u2019s previous instructions. The other two judges on the panel had similar questions, the Associated Press reported.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of the past 15 relevant contests in the state, the only one a Black-voter-preferred candidate would have won using these maps, a Brennan Center for Justice analysis found, was the December 2017 Senate race in which Doug Jones defeated the Republican Roy Moore, who\u2019d been accused of sex crimes with teenagers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Members of the legislature who chose the currently proposed maps out of many submitted for their consideration said they were lobbied by national figures including Speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, and Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The District Court has yet to issue a ruling on the new maps or indicate when it might, but with next year\u2019s elections looming, if it rules against the state\u2019s proposals, it may appoint a cartographer of its own choosing to have them in place in October.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A nationally known cartographer and redistricting expert, Stanford Professor Nathaniel Persily, on July 24 abruptly stepped away from the Alabama assignment he\u2019d been given in February and has declined repeated requests from Ethnic Media Services to discuss the situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Source: Published without changes from Ethic Media Services<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Mark Hedin For more than 60 years, from Selma in 1965 to Shelby County in 2013, the state of Alabama<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5340,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[232,24,48],"tags":[66,237,78,85],"class_list":["post-5339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-civil-rights","category-regular-column","category-social-justice","tag-african-american","tag-alabama","tag-racial-discrimination","tag-voting-restrictions"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5339"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5341,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5339\/revisions\/5341"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}