Alabama Secretary of State John H. Merrill declined to comment on the ruling.
Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the party’s main map-making organization, said the map was based on a map approved in 2011 by President Obama’s Justice Department, then headed by Mr. Holder, and in accordance with the voting rights Act.
How US reclassification works
What is reclassification? It is redrawing the boundaries of the congressional and state legislative districts. It happens every 10 years, after the census, to reflect changes in the population.
“The new map maintains the status quo,” said Mr. Kincaid. “It does not violate Section 2 of the VRA under the current application of the Act and should be enforced.”
For three decades, Alabama has had one majority district: the black congressional district that elected black Democrats. The state’s other six districts have been represented only by white Republicans as of 2011.
In Alabama’s lone majority district, represented by Terri Sewell, a Democrat, more than 60 percent of voters are black, representing nearly a third of the state’s black population. Most of the state’s remaining black population is split — or “cracked” — among the first, second, and third congressional districts, all of which have been safely Republican for years.
In 2018, a group of black voters filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Alabama’s map violated the Voting Rights Act. They lost.
“It’s time for Alabama to move past its sordid history of racial discrimination in the polls, and to listen to and respond to the needs and concerns of voters of color,” Tish Gotell Faulks, the legal director of the Alabama ACLU, said in a statement. said after Wednesday’s ruling.
President Biden and Congressional Democrats sought to pass legislation that would have, among other things, limited partisan gerrymandering by state lawmakers. That attempt failed when Arizona Senators Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia Joe Manchin III, both Democrats, thwarted a party-wide effort to overcome Republican opposition by changing Senate rules.
Nick Corasanitic reporting contributed.
