Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices Thursday in a surprise strike down of Alabama’s congressional map for likely violating the Voting Rights Act.
In a narrow 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court held up a lower court’s ruling that ordered Alabama to create a new congressional map with an additional majority-Black district. Despite Black residents making up about 27 percent of the state population, Alabama’s congressional map included only one majority-Black district out of the state’s seven total districts.
Roberts and Kavanaugh joined liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson in ruling that the map likely violated the Voting Rights Act based on how it was drawn. Roberts authored the majority opinion, writing that the majority is “content to reject Alabama’s invitation to change existing law.”
“As we explain below, we find Alabama’s new approach to §2 compelling neither in theory nor in practice. We accordingly decline to recast our §2 case law as Alabama requested,” Roberts wrote.
The ruling comes as a surprise after conservative members of the Court signaled last year that they were open to narrowing Voting Rights Act protections. The Court had placed the lower court’s ruling on hold in a 5-4 emergency decision so that the justices could take more time to address the case.
At the time, the justices appeared to struggle with what legal benchmarks would determine whether the makeup of Alabama’s Black population and its representation in Congress could result in illegal discrimination. In the majority opinion published Thursday, Roberts wrote that Section Two of the Voting Act required that political processes in the state need to be “equally open” to ensure minority voters do not face “less opportunity” when it comes to voting.
“Under the Court’s precedents, a district is not equally open when minority voters face — unlike their majority peers — bloc voting along racial lines, arising against the backdrop of substantial racial discrimination within the State, that renders a minority vote unequal to a vote by a nonminority voter,” Roberts wrote.
The state noted that 2 million computer-drawn designs, which did not consider race and weighed traditional redistricting factors, regularly resulted in the creation of one minority-majority district. The challengers had to show Alabama’s map had fewer minority-majority districts than the benchmark, the state contended.
For his part, Kavanaugh argued that a proceeding case helped determine that Alabama’s premise is “wrong.”
“But as this court has long recognized — and as all Members of this Court today agree — the text of §2 establishes an effects test, not an intent test,” Kavanaugh wrote. “And the effects test … requires certain circumstances that courts account for the race of voters so as to prevent the cracking or packing — whether intentional or not — of large and geographically compact minority populations.”