Protecting democracy in redistricting under the Voting Rights Act

In 2022, the County joined a coalition of local governments in filing an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in support of plaintiffs challenging Alabama’s congressional district map drawn during the redistricting cycle that followed the 2020 Census.  The lawsuit argued that, under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Alabama Legislature should have drawn its map of congressional districts so that two of the districts were majority-minority, rather than only one.  Alabama’s position that all congressional district map drawings must essentially ignore all considerations of race and national origin would have upended decades of voting rights case law.  The brief filed by the County and other local governments drew upon the County’s recent experience in redistricting, including the careful attention to communities of interest and to compliance with the Voting Rights Act.  The brief also noted that local governments are limited in their ability to use the complicated computerized mapping that Alabama’s approach would have required.  In June 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plaintiffs’ favor, sending the congressional map back to the lower court to be redrawn in compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.  While the local government brief was not specifically cited, the Court’s reasoning drew upon many of the arguments made in the brief.