Supreme Court Sides With GOP in Alabama Election Map Case

“Late judicial tinkering with election laws can lead to disruption and to unanticipated and unfair consequences for candidates, political parties, and voters, among others,” wrote Chief Justice Kavanaugh.

QUICK FACTS:
  • The Supreme Court on Monday put on hold a lower court ruling that Alabama must draw new congressional districts before the 2022 elections to, according to Democrats, increase Black voting power, The Associated Press reports.
  • The high court order gives Republicans better chances to hold six of the state’s seven seats in the House of Representatives.
  • The court’s action, by a 5-4 vote, means the upcoming elections will be conducted under a map drawn by Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature.
  • A three-judge lower court, including two judges appointed by President Donald Trump, had ruled that the state was violating the federal Voting Rights Act by diluting the political power of Black voters by not creating a second district in which they made up a majority, or close to it.
  • However, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito, part of the conservative majority, said the lower court’s order for a new map came too close to the 2022 election cycle, AP reports, and held off making determinative comments about the “ultimate merits” of the legal debate.
  • “Contrary to the dissent’s mistaken rhetoric, I take no position at this time on the ultimate merits of the parties’ underlying legal dispute,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote. “And I need not do so until the Court receives full briefing, holds oral argument, and engages in our usual extensive internal deliberations.”
WHAT ELSE JUSTICE KAVANAUGH SAID:
  • Kavanaugh explain his vote stressing the court had already declined in the past to change the rules close to an election:
  • “When an election is close at hand, the rules of the road must be clear and settled. Late judicial tinkering with election laws can lead to disruption and to unanticipated and unfair consequences for candidates, political parties, and voters, among others. It is one thing for a State on its own to toy with its election laws close to a State’s elections. But it is quite another thing for a federal court to swoop in and re-do a State’s election laws in the period close to an election,” he wrote in an opinion Alito joined.
BACKGROUND:
  • Alabama lawmakers had redrawn the state’s congressional districts following the results of the 2020 census, several groups of voters then sued, arguing that the new maps diluted the voting power of Black residents.
  • Chief Justice John Roberts joined his three liberal colleagues in dissent, according to AP.
  • The justices will decide whether the map produced by the state violates voting rights law at some later date.

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