Federal court blocks Alabama’s new map gerrymander

Alabama congressional – A federal three-judge panel in Alabama ruled Tuesday that the state’s latest congressional map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, rejecting Alabama’s bid to use a plan it says should govern upcoming elections. The decision follows the Supreme Court’s s

By Tuesday evening, Alabama’s political map had once again become the center of a national fight—this time inside a federal courtroom where the justices in the room already knew how hard the next fight would be.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court in Alabama struck down Alabama’s latest congressional map, ruling it is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The ruling came from judges appointed by Donald Trump included in the panel. and the court rejected Alabama’s attempt to further dilute the political power of Black voters.

Alabama has already indicated it will file an emergency appeal. That means the Supreme Court is likely to decide whether the lower court’s order stands—an outcome that matters because the map in dispute is tied to when and how elections are conducted. and to which communities get real influence over representation.

This case is the latest chapter in Allen v. Milligan, a long-running saga that began after the 2020 census. In response to that count, Alabama redrew its congressional map so that only one of its seven districts was majority-minority. Voting-rights activists challenged the result and argued the map intentionally diluted Black voting power. especially for Black residents in the “Black belt. ” a region that cuts laterally across Alabama.

Alabama’s map was not merely criticized; it was met with a specific remedy. The voting-rights activists asked the state to draw a second majority-minority district. Alabama is 26 percent Black and 6 percent Latino. so having two of seven districts be majority-minority was presented as straightforward math—not a political demand without grounding.

The legal path has been anything but straightforward. After district court proceedings, the Supreme Court intervened in February 2022. In that ruling. the court said it was too close to the November 2022 midterms to force Alabama to redraw its maps. The 2022 election proceeded with only one majority-minority district.

In 2023, the Supreme Court took the case again, this time not just on timing but on the merits. The court ruled that Alabama’s maps were racist and therefore unconstitutional. The Alabama legislature then put forward another map—described here as the 2023 Plan—which was essentially the same as the 2021 map the Supreme Court had rejected. The district court rejected this 2023 Plan as well and ordered a special master to draw a new map.

The special master map created two majority-minority districts that kept Black communities intact across the state. The 2024 elections took place under that map. And the 2026 midterm elections were set to take place under the same map.

Everything shifted after the Supreme Court’s end-of-April ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, a decision described here as effectively killing the 1965 Voting Rights Act and allowing states to resurrect Jim Crow types of voter suppression, including gerrymandering away Black voting power.

When Callais landed, Alabama “immediately sprung into action.” The state interpreted Callais as overruling Allen v. Milligan and attempted to reinstate its planned 2023 map. That map is what the three-judge district court panel rejected on Tuesday.

The ruling treated Callais as not giving Alabama a free pass. The court found that even after Callais. the remaining shard of the Voting Rights Act still prohibits maps that are intentionally racist. It concluded that Alabama’s legislative map intentionally sought to take voting power away from Black people. The district court pointed to the fact that this finding aligned with what the Supreme Court itself made when Milligan was decided. and the panel said it found nothing in the record suggesting a different conclusion.

Because of that, the court ordered Alabama to keep using the special master map, the one with two majority-minority districts, for the upcoming elections.

At the center of the dispute is the Supreme Court’s willingness—at least as a matter of practice—to treat election timing as a shield. In the court’s own doctrine known as the Purcell Principle. changes to election rules cannot be made “too close” to an upcoming election. In 2022. the Supreme Court used this principle to uphold the racist map Alabama now wants to use. and the district court’s Tuesday ruling turned on a different timing question: which map counts as the “legitimate” current one.

The district court argued that the special master map is the legitimate one because the election was set to be held under it until several weeks ago; under that logic. Alabama would be trying to change the rules. Alabama’s emergency appeal is expected to argue the opposite: that the planned map—the one that was not set to be used in this election—is the current one because the legislature voted after the Callais decision to try it again.

As the district court noted in its ruling. the clock has already run past a point where changing district boundaries can be treated as a normal administrative adjustment. Candidates are reportedly already involved in primary contests based on the special master map. Under the district court’s reasoning, this puts the state too late for a boundary reset.

The tension here is not subtle. If the Supreme Court chooses to apply Purcell in Alabama’s favor, it can decide that the practical timing should control—even when multiple courts have already found discriminatory intent in the map Alabama is asking to put back on the books.

The same pattern is described in other states’ actions after Callais. Louisiana called off primaries to erase Black districts before the midterm elections. Tennessee split the city of Memphis so it could take away the state’s lone Black district. Those choices are central to the stakes in Alabama’s emergency appeal because they illustrate how quickly states moved to reshape election structures.

The Tuesday panel’s ruling also anchored the case in a warning about retroactive legitimacy. The panel wrote that Alabama cannot use Callais to legitimize its pre-Callais decision to double down on the discriminatory vote dilution that “we and the Supreme Court found. ” and it warned that if retroactive validation strategies were available. states would be encouraged to govern themselves according to what they think federal law ought to be rather than what federal law is.

Now Alabama faces the immediate consequence of what happens next in Washington: the Supreme Court’s view of Purcell’s boundaries, and whether the higher court will keep letting timing function as a workaround for racial gerrymandering findings.

Tuesday’s order keeps the special master map in place at least for the moment. But Alabama has said it will appeal urgently. and the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision is expected to determine whether the 2026 midterms will proceed under the map the district court ordered—or under the version the state tried to reinstate.

Alabama congressional map racial gerrymander Allen v. Milligan Louisiana v. Callais Purcell Principle Voting Rights Act Black voters Supreme Court federal district court