Alabama's racial gerrymandering goes before Supreme Court

Redistricting is acknowledged to be a partisan process, with the party that controls the statehouse exercising more influence on the drafting of new maps. But in the South and other regions of “racially polarized voting” — where whites and minorities have tended to elect vastly different candidates — partisan redistricting can resemble unlawful race-based gerrymandering. (This has recently been litigated in Texas and Virginia.)

As lawmakers do after every decennial Census, Alabama’s Republicans drew new boundaries for the state’s 105 house and 35 senate districts in 2012. They adopted a calculus to avoid infringing on the Voting Rights Act: The number of majority-black districts would stay the same, and the percentage of African Americans in a given district would closely resemble what it had been in the previous redistricting. (Between 2000 and 2010, the state’s white population decreased slightly, to 67 percent; African Americans remained stable, at just over 25 percent; and Hispanics grew to nearly 4 percent.) 

Alabama Democrats sued to undo this plan, alleging that the new districts were unlawfully based on a naked racial quota rather than African American voters’ “ability to elect” candidates of their choice. They accuse the GOP of having packed African American voters into already black-controlled districts, thereby diluting their vote elsewhere. In some cases, districts that had a black majority ended up with a black supermajority, while white districts became whiter.

According to Michael Li, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice, which filed a brief opposing the state of Alabama, the kinds of districting strategies that protected black voters 30 years ago may no longer be relevant. “There are two types of districts: majority districts where African Americans clearly control the outcome, and other districts where they aren’t the majority but they have influence,” he said. Alabama’s 2012 maps “cram African Americans into a handful of districts, so you’re losing that additional ability to influence elections.”

The Republicans defended their methodology and said they had no choice but to move voters around. Their pleadings explain that certain black districts had, in their previous iteration, been deliberately “underpopulated” in an attempt to “spread black voters into neighboring majority-white districts so they could vote in support of white Democratic candidates.” The co-chairs of the legislature’s redistricting committee, State Senator Gerald Dial and State Representative Jim McClendon, both Republicans, declined to comment.

GOP State Representative Dan Williams's north-central Fifth District lost about 5,000 constituents and “was shrunk quite a bit” in the redistricting, he said. The population of whites decreased by 5 percent; the population of blacks increased by 2.5 percent. He believes the Republicans “did the best they could” with a difficult process. “I don’t think there’s any effort made to harm minorities ... any efforts made to disenfranchise anybody,” Williams said. In his view, the lawsuit is sour grapes: “Until the pendulum swings back, the Democratic Party in Alabama is really on lean times.”

But his former colleague, Democrat Greg Burdine, who recently lost his seat in House District One, blames the redistricting in part for his defeat. (During oral argument, the justices asked for evidence that precincts had been split by race.) Burdine’s district used to encompass the northwest city of Florence as well as a few towns and rural sections of Lauderdale and Colbert counties. It now includes only a fraction of Florence and a sliced-up area of the Shoals region, spread over the Tennessee River. “What they did was move minorities into the districts where the Democrats had been there 20 or more years,” he said “They moved those over because they knew they were going to win anyway. They kind of nullified their vote.”

“Our Republican super-majority was not looking out for the minorities in those four years that I was [in the legislature],” Burdine added. “The Bills they passed regarding immigration, abortion, health care, voter ID. You just have to look at the voting record and see whether the laws passed have helped [minorities].”

Alabama is still “one of the most polarized electorates in the nation,” said Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. By packing high concentrations of black voters into majority-minority districts, he said, the state has created “bleached white districts and super-majority black districts where candidates for public office have little incentive to reach across the racial divide to appeal to voters of a different race. The [Supreme Court] case is important because we need, as a state, to reverse the pattern of polarized voting, not to exacerbate it.”

The federal government filed an amicus, or “friend of the court,” brief in support of neither party. Without condemning Alabama’s plan outright — after all, the plan had been granted preclearance — the brief observes that the redistricting did move 120,000 blacks into majority-black house districts and 106,000 into majority-black senate districts. It has asked the Supreme Court to remand the case for district-by-district scrutiny in accordance with the Voting Rights Act.

Given the Shelby decision, it's unclear what a remand would mean. Alabama is no longer obligated to seek federal preclearance for any changes to its voting procedures, whether in redistricting or for a voter ID requirement.

Later this term, the Supreme Court will hear another redistricting case — out of Arizona. “People didn’t necessarily expect the court to take this,” said Li of the Brennan Center. The Alabama and Arizona cases are “a continuation of the voting wars, where people have jockeyed for advantage whatever way possible. What is the degree to which the courts are willing to go to police that?”