Supreme Court lets Alabama race-map advance despite timing

A brief, unsigned Supreme Court decision on Tuesday cleared the way for Alabama to use a congressional map the state’s own legal record has repeatedly described as racially discriminatory—despite election deadlines that leave administrators little time to reas

Alabama’s election machinery is already in motion when the Supreme Court moves. On Tuesday. the court approved the state’s ability to proceed with a new congressional map—even though election administrators have only days to reassign voters into new districts and mail ballots have already started going out.

The decision came in Allen v. Milligan, a case rooted in Alabama’s refusal to draw more than one Black-opportunity district. The Supreme Court’s order was brief and unsigned. and it let Alabama move forward with a congressional map the lower courts found to be racially discriminatory. In the case’s history. courts described the problem not only in outcomes. but in the way legislators drew lines and in Alabama’s own refusal to comply with earlier rulings.

Allen began in 2021. when Alabama drew congressional district lines with just one Black-opportunity district—a setup the state has kept since the 1990s. Black Alabamians sued. arguing the Voting Rights Act required Alabama to draw an additional Black-opportunity district and that the redistricting process was tainted by intentional racial discrimination. They won in 2022 before a district court panel and again in 2023 at the Supreme Court.

After the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, Alabama refused to draw district lines with a second Black-opportunity district. The same district court panel then found that the state’s next map reflected intentional racial discrimination. The panel pointed to how the legislature drew the map. including discussions about creating communities for those with European heritage and the placement of Black voters. It also emphasized Alabama’s refusal to draw a second Black-opportunity district after being explicitly ordered to do so.

That finding was not treated as academic. The district court imposed its own map for the 2024 election. But Alabama’s litigation continued, and so did the Supreme Court’s shift.

In April, the Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that plaintiffs challenging racial vote dilution under the Voting Rights Act must prove intentional racial discrimination. not merely discriminatory effects. At the same time. the Court’s approach allowed legislators to immunize themselves by arguing partisanship as a pretext for eliminating majority-minority districts—an easier move in states with high levels of racial polarization.

Alabama Republicans seized on that framework. the record described here says. not to expand the Voting Rights Act’s reach. but to weaken the Reconstruction Amendments that gave the law its constitutional life. The Tuesday decision followed that path. Even as Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority that “We have not overruled Allen. ” the order nevertheless expanded Callais’s logic.

The road to Tuesday’s approval started with Alabama’s response to the district court’s imposed map. Alabama asked the Supreme Court to lift the district court panel’s injunction and reconsider the case in light of Callais. The panel did reconsider—and still found Alabama’s map racially discriminatory, even under Callais. Alabama then petitioned the Supreme Court again, asking the Court to overrule the panel.

Tuesday’s ruling did just that.

The practical effect is that Alabama can implement a map the district court had found unconstitutional under both the Voting Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. The broader legal effect. as described in the decision’s aftermath. is that it raised the bar for proving intentional discrimination under both voting-rights and constitutional theories. In particular. it required courts to presume “legislative good faith” whenever evaluating the legislature’s actions—making it harder to challenge a discriminatory map even when evidence of intent is present.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented. joined by the other two liberal justices. and she focused on timing and the way the Supreme Court’s standards change depending on who benefits. She described the shift as the court manipulating the Purcell principle—its long-standing concern that courts should not change election rules too close to an election because it can produce confusion.

The Purcell principle was invoked in Allen v. Milligan in 2022. At the time. the election was seven weeks away. and Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Alito wrote in concurring language that “[e]ven heroic efforts likely would not be enough to avoid chaos and confusion.” That logic allowed Alabama to hold its 2022 election under a map that gave the state an additional Republican congressman.

Now. Sotomayor said. the court sees no problem with lifting the injunction on the district court’s map while a primary election is underway. with voters having already begun casting mail ballots five weeks ago. The dissent also pointed to the administrative reality: the district court panel’s order had required a second Black-opportunity district. and Alabama’s own elections leadership testified that reassigning voters into new congressional districts usually takes three to four months to complete.

In Tuesday’s unsigned decision, the majority treated that mismatch as manageable. The dissent argued the court’s action turned Purcell into a flexible tool.

The Tuesday order included a sentence with a meaning beyond the procedural posture: “[W]hile federal courts should not impose changes close to an election. … States are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interests.” In the framing that Sotomayor criticized. the Supreme Court appeared to say that Purcell restrictions do not apply when the Alabama legislature itself passed a law in the middle of an ongoing election to redraw congressional districts—after years of defying the entire federal judiciary.

Sotomayor warned that this invites chaos with no practical remedy. If lawmakers can redraw districts in the last minute and avoid the usual judicial restraints, she argued, then elections become vulnerable to disruption—especially when the Supreme Court steps in and removes lower-court enforcement.

The dissent also criticized the court for not accounting for its own role in any confusion or disruption. Sotomayor wrote that the Supreme Court could have left the injunction in place until after the election, preventing the “chaos and confusion” it had previously treated as too serious to ignore.

The dispute isn’t only about one map or one cycle. It has become a referendum on how the court applies its own rules. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has previously called this kind of shifting approach “Calvinball. ” and her dissent in a case involving the Trump administration’s cancellation of research grants said. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”.

In Allen v. Milligan, this time the record describes the court’s message differently. Sotomayor’s dissent framed the outcome as a pattern in which the court’s timing doctrine aligns with the incentives of Republican-led legislatures—especially when those legislatures have already challenged every step of the litigation.

Tuesday’s decision. the record concludes. allows Alabama to proceed with a congressional map the courts had identified as racially discriminatory. while compressing the timetable for election administration. Rep. Shomari Figures (D-Ala.) lost a Black-opportunity district as Alabama Republicans eliminated it with help from the Supreme Court.

The broader implication is stark for voters and election workers alike: what was previously impossible under the court’s own timing logic suddenly becomes permissible, leaving administrators to absorb a late-stage churn of district boundaries—at a moment when ballots are already moving.

For those watching the Supreme Court’s role in civil-rights enforcement, the ruling lands as a turning point. It not only changes the immediate map. but it also changes what challengers will have to prove next time—under the Voting Rights Act and. the dissent argues. under the 14th Amendment as well.

United States Supreme Court Alabama Allen v. Milligan congressional map Voting Rights Act Louisiana v. Callais 14th Amendment Purcell principle election administrators redistricting Shomari Figures