The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled against an Alabama redistricting plan, saying an attempt to maintain a consistent percentage of black voters in districts would reduce their electoral clout.
The 5-4 decision saw Justice Anthony Kennedy siding with the more liberal justices against the state. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in the majority opinion that Alabama’s plan was “legally erroneous” and that while it may have kept percentages of the black vote similar in the state as a whole, it had larger effects on individual districts.
The court remanded the case back to the district court with a call to evaluate those smaller-scale effects.
The case hinges on Alabama’s 2012 redistricting of its State House and Senate seats. The Alabama Legislative Black Caucus and the Alabama Democratic Conference argued that the State added too many black voters into certain districts in order to consolidate their power into a fewer number of districts.
Breyer’s decision clarifies that the Voting Rights Act specifically protects the ability of minority voters to elect the candidate of their choice, and doesn’t call on a jurisdiction to keep the percentage of the minority vote at a fixed percentage. He says that Alabama asked the “wrong question.”
“They asked how to maintain the present minority percentages in majority-minority districts, instead of asking the extent to which they must preserve existing minority percentages in order to maintain the minority’s present ability to elect the candidate of its choice,” he writes.
“Because asking the wrong question may well have led to the wrong answer, the court cannot accept the District Court’s conclusion.”