A panel of three federal judges issued a preliminary injunction on Tuesday, pausing Alabama’s attempt to adopt a new, Republican-favored congressional map for the upcoming midterm elections. The court determined that the state legislature’s proposal was designed to diminish the electoral strength of minority communities. Instead of implementing the contested boundaries, the judges ordered Alabama to retain the court-approved map utilized during the 2024 election cycle, which features two districts where Black residents represent a majority or near-majority of voters.
The ruling directly impedes a concerted effort by state Republicans to flip a highly competitive U.S. House seat currently occupied by Democratic Representative Shomari Figures. This redistricting dispute intensified nationwide following a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision involving a Louisiana voting rights case, which shifted the legal standards for demonstrating minority vote dilution. In response to that federal shift, Alabama officials abruptly rescheduled four of their impending congressional primaries to August 11, intending to revert to a state-drafted 2023 map that featured only one majority-Black district.
However, after reviewing the legislative history of the 2023 proposal, the judicial panel concluded that the state had willfully engineered the boundaries to fragment the Black population across separate districts. Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus, along with District Judges Anna Manasco and Terry Moorer, wrote in their collective opinion: “Ultimately, we cannot see our way clear to requiring Alabamians to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” adding that “We again cannot understand the 2023 Plan as anything other than intentionally discriminatory.”
Civil rights organizations and plaintiffs celebrated the decision, emphasizing that it prevents significant logistical disruption for voters who had already begun participating in the election cycle under the previous lines. Moving forward with the state’s proposed lines would have necessitated what the judges termed “an expensive, aggressive, and perhaps logistically impossible voter reassignment effort.”
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall expressed strong disagreement with the intervention, labeling the state’s design a “blandly unobjectionable congressional map.” Marshall confirmed that the state intends to immediately challenge the intervention, stating, “I am disappointed, but not at all surprised, that the three-judge panel has again struck down Alabama’s blandly unobjectionable congressional map that has been in place for decades,” and concluding, “Know this – in my mind, it is not a matter of whether we win this case, only when.” The legal fight is expected to quickly escalate back to the nation’s highest court as both major parties compete for control of a narrowly divided House of Representatives.
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