Supreme Court lets Alabama use a map courts (Jun 2026)

The Supreme Court on June 2, 2026, in an unsigned four-page order in Allen v. Milligan (docket 25A1314), allowed Alabama to use in the November 2026 elections a congressional map that a three-judge federal district court had struck down as intentionally discriminatory against Black voters. The Court split 6-3 along ideological lines. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissented. The order was issued after 9 p.m. EDT and gave no detailed legal rationale beyond citing the Court's April 29 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.

Alabama is 27% Black. Its seven-member congressional delegation, under the 2023 map the Court reinstated, contains only one majority-Black district — the 7th Congressional District, which is 52.5% Black and anchored in Birmingham. The district court had ordered Alabama to maintain a second majority-Black district (CD-2), finding the state's 2023 map intentionally cracked and packed Black voters across three districts to prevent them from electing a second candidate of their choice. Rep. Shomari Figures, elected in 2024 to represent the redrawn CD-2, will almost certainly lose his seat in November because the reinstated 2023 map makes CD-2 a Republican-leaning district with a 40% Black population — well below a majority.

The order is the direct consequence of Louisiana v. Callais, decided 6-3 on April 29, 2026, in an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Callais rewrote the test for Section 2 challenges. Before Callais, plaintiffs could win a racial claim by satisfying three preconditions from the Court's 1986 ruling in Thornburg v. Gingles: the minority group must be sufficiently large and compact to form a majority in a district, it must be politically cohesive, and white voters must vote as a bloc to defeat the minority group's preferred candidates. After Callais, plaintiffs must now prove 'evidence that supports a strong inference that the State intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race' — an intentionality standard that legal scholars say makes it nearly impossible to prove a Section 2 violation.

Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, warned that Callais would affect well beyond Congress: 'State legislatures, city councils, school boards, water boards, any entity that requires redistricting will be impacted by the decision.'

Section 2 of the of 1965 (52 U.S.C. § 10301) prohibits any voting qualification, practice, or procedure that results in the denial or abridgement of the right to vote on account of race or color. Congress enacted Section 2 as a nationwide prohibition applying to all elections — federal, state, and local — with no expiration date. It was strengthened in 1982 when Congress overrode a Supreme Court ruling (Mobile v. Bolden, 1980) that had required proof of discriminatory intent, adding language establishing a 'results test' so plaintiffs could win by showing discriminatory effects without proving intent. Callais effectively reversed the 1982 standard, restoring an intent requirement that Congress had specifically rejected 44 years earlier.

The VRA's other major enforcement tool — Section 5 — died in 2013. The Shelby County v. Holder decision, issued June 25, 2013, in a 5-4 opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, struck down Section 4(b) of the VRA, which was the coverage formula determining which jurisdictions had to get federal approval before changing their voting laws. Without Section 4(b), Section 5 became inoperable. Within 24 hours of the Shelby County decision, Texas announced it would implement a voter ID law that had previously been blocked under preclearance; Alabama announced enforcement of its own photo ID law three days later. The preclearance mechanism had blocked over 1,000 discriminatory voting changes between 1982 and 2006.

The Court's 2021 ruling in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (6-3, Justice Alito writing) narrowed Section 2 for voter restriction challenges before Callais finished the job for redistricting. In Brnovich, the Court upheld Arizona's out-of-precinct voting restrictions and third-party ballot collection ban despite evidence they disproportionately burdened minority voters. The majority established a new 'guideposts' framework that courts should consider, including the size of the burden relative to the 'usual burdens of voting' — an approach the ACLU's Voting Rights Project said made Section 2 nearly unworkable for restrictions that fall short of outright exclusion.

The history of Alabama's redistricting fight runs through the 2023 Allen v. Milligan ruling, when the Court held 5-4 — Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh joining the three liberal justices — that Alabama's 2021 map likely violated Section 2 by failing to include a second majority-Black district. That ruling was a temporary reprieve. Alabama redrew its maps but drew a 2023 map that advocates argued still diluted Black voting power. The three-judge district court agreed in May 2026, finding intentional discrimination and ordering the court-drawn map used. Alabama immediately appealed to SCOTUS, which issued the June 2 stay within days — using Callais as justification to override the district court's finding.

The 15th Amendment, ratified February 3, 1870, explicitly barred states from denying the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Black men voted in substantial numbers across the South during Reconstruction, electing 22 Black members of Congress between 1870 and 1901. After federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877, Southern states systematically nullified the 15th Amendment through poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and terroristic violence. By 1965, only 11% of eligible Black voters in Alabama were registered. Congress passed the VRA specifically to enforce the 15th Amendment against this century-long evasion.

Voter registration among Black Alabamians rose from 11% to 51% within one year of the VRA. By 2021, Black Americans held 60 seats across both chambers of Congress — up from just 6 in 1965. The overwhelming majority of Black members of Congress were elected from majority-minority districts created under VRA enforcement.

Bloody Sunday — March 7, 1965 — was the catalyst for the VRA's passage. John Lewis and approximately 600 marchers were beaten by state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama as they attempted to march to Montgomery to demand voting rights. National television broadcast the violence. President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965, introducing voting rights legislation and borrowing the civil rights movement's own slogan: 'We shall overcome.' Congress passed the VRA on August 5, 1965; Johnson signed it August 6. Every member of Alabama's congressional delegation voted against the measure.

The Alabama SCOTUS order set off a cascade of redistricting actions across the country. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp called a special legislative session in May 2026 to redraw Georgia's congressional map under Callais. North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee were already drawing new maps eliminating majority-minority districts. At least five states moved rapidly to implement changes expected to add five to 12 Republican House seats nationally. Democracy Docket's Marc Elias, who litigated the Alabama case, said the Court had 'given Republican legislatures a blank check to draw maps that silence Black and Latino voters.' The redraws will all face lawsuits, but courts will now apply Callais' intent standard — a substantially higher bar than what plaintiffs defeated in the 2023 Allen v. Milligan round.

Justice Sotomayor's 17-page dissent argued the majority order 'disregards both democratic values and the rule of law' and paved the way for 'a chaotic election.' She wrote that the district court had applied the correct standard under Allen v. Milligan (2023) and that the majority was using Callais as a retroactive excuse to gut a finding of intentional discrimination already made by a lower court. Sotomayor called the Court's willingness to override a district court's factual finding of intentional racial discrimination 'an extraordinary departure from decades of Voting Rights Act precedent.'

Supreme Court lets Alabama use a map courts found racially discriminatory