Alabama Primary Splits as Supreme Court Clears Contested Map, Four Districts Defer to August

Polls opened at 7 a.m. Monday morning across three of Alabama’s seven congressional districts in what would have been a routine primary cycle — except that the congressional map voters are using today was blocked by a federal court last year on two separate constitutional grounds, cleared by an unsigned Supreme Court order just eight days ago, and is still the subject of pending emergency motions that could affect the four districts voting in August.

Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen confirmed last week that the May 19 primary would proceed as scheduled for districts three, four, and five. Districts one, two, six, and seven — the districts where the redistricting battle has been most acute — were deferred to a special primary on August 11. Election officials said ballots for those four districts had already been printed before the Supreme Court’s order arrived on May 11, making a reprinting logistically impossible in the available window.

The result is a congressional primary divided by litigation: three districts voting today under a map that had been under injunction, four more in August under whatever legal status the case holds by then.

How the Map Got Here

Alabama’s redistricting fight stretches back to 2021, when the state legislature adopted a congressional map following the 2020 census that preserved only a single majority-Black congressional district. In a state where Black residents constitute roughly 27 percent of the population, civil rights plaintiffs argued the map deliberately minimized Black voters’ ability to elect representatives of their choosing.

In June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Allen v. Milligan that Alabama’s map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and ordered the state to draw a second district in which Black voters had a meaningful opportunity to elect their preferred candidate. The ruling was notable for being joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh alongside the court’s three liberal justices — a coalition that explicitly reaffirmed a central pillar of redistricting law that conservative advocates had sought to eliminate.

Alabama’s legislature drew a new map in 2023, but rather than creating a majority-Black second district, it drew what became known as the “crab claw” configuration of District 2 — a geographically tortured shape that connected Black communities across southeastern Alabama while stopping short of making the district majority-Black. Critics said it was designed to appear compliant while achieving the opposite of what the court required.

The three-judge panel of the Northern District of Alabama that had overseen the case since its beginning blocked that map too. And it reached beyond the Voting Rights Act to do it.

Two Findings, One Block

The panel’s opinion blocking Alabama’s 2023 map rested on two independent legal bases. The first was a continued violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the same provision at the center of the 2023 Allen v. Milligan decision. The second was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, grounded in a finding of intentional racial discrimination.

“We cannot understand the 2023 Plan as anything other than an intentional effort to dilute Black Alabamians’ voting strength,” the panel wrote. Having been told explicitly by the Supreme Court to draw a second majority-Black district, the state’s legislature instead drew something designed to technically respond to that order while functionally defying it. That finding — that the map was the product of deliberate discriminatory purpose — sits on independent constitutional ground that does not require the Voting Rights Act at all.

The distinction matters because of what happened on April 29.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais fundamentally rewrote the standard for Voting Rights Act redistricting challenges, replacing a four-decade framework focused on discriminatory effects with a new requirement to show circumstances giving rise to a strong inference of intentional discrimination. The majority denied it was reinstating a pure intent test, but civil rights groups and the court’s three dissenters argued the practical effect was the same. The ruling cleared the way for new redistricting challenges in states with majority-minority districts across the South.

Eight days after Callais, the Supreme Court issued an unsigned, one-paragraph order in Allen v. Milligan vacating the Northern District’s injunction and remanding the case for reconsideration “in light of” the new ruling. The order gave no further analysis and made no findings.

It also said nothing about the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Dissent and What It Left Open

Three justices said the order was wrong, and their reasoning signals how the case will likely unfold next.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the May 11 order. The panel’s Fourteenth Amendment finding “is independent of, and unaffected by, any of the legal issues discussed in Callais,” Sotomayor wrote. Sending the case back to the lower court achieves nothing, she argued, when the actual constitutional basis for the injunction — a finding of intentional racial discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause — was left untouched by anything the majority did in Callais and has not been challenged by Alabama in any pending petition.

The dissent’s position is that the injunction should remain in place. If the Fourteenth Amendment finding is legally correct, the map is unconstitutional regardless of what the Voting Rights Act requires or how Callais rewrote it.

The American Civil Liberties Union, lead counsel for the plaintiffs throughout the Alabama litigation, filed emergency motions with the Northern District after the Supreme Court’s order, arguing that the panel should reissue its injunction on the Fourteenth Amendment ground without waiting for the VRA analysis to proceed. As of Monday morning, those motions were pending.

Whether the panel reissues the injunction on the constitutional ground before August 11 — and whether that triggers another emergency application to the Supreme Court — will determine whether the four deferred districts vote under the current map or a redrawn one.

What Is Actually at Stake

Alabama’s seventh congressional district, held since 2011 by representatives backed by the state’s Black political organizations, is the district the original Allen v. Milligan litigation was designed to supplement. The question of whether a second majority-Black district should exist in Alabama’s southwestern corridor — connecting the Black Belt counties, portions of the Gulf Coast, and communities running toward Birmingham — is what the 2023 SCOTUS ruling was supposed to resolve.

The answer has never been implemented. Alabama’s legislature drew a map designed to avoid it. The federal court blocked that map. The Supreme Court cleared that block — temporarily, on a narrow procedural ground related to a new ruling that may not affect the constitutional question at all.

The broader 2026 redistricting landscape has seen similar patterns across the South, as courts and legislatures continue to contest maps drawn after the 2020 census. Tennessee’s redistricting fight over Memphis’s congressional lines presented a parallel set of questions about whether VRA Section 2 and constitutional equal protection operate independently — with courts ultimately having to address both threads separately.

The Callais decision was widely expected to make redistricting litigation harder to win. But the Alabama case suggests a countermove available to plaintiffs in states where the record shows something beyond discriminatory effects: a finding that a legislature acted with deliberate discriminatory purpose survives Callais entirely because it never depended on the Voting Rights Act to begin with.

What Comes Next

The immediate question is what the Northern District does with the ACLU’s emergency motions. If the panel reissues its injunction on the Fourteenth Amendment ground before August 11, Alabama would need to draw yet another map and reprint ballots for four congressional districts — an outcome that would push the state’s redistricting fight into its fifth consecutive election cycle.

If the panel does not reissue the injunction, or if the Supreme Court stays any such order, the four deferred districts vote August 11 under the current contested map, and the VRA analysis proceeds through briefing and argument on remand. That path could run through the 2026 general election and into the next redistricting cycle.

Alabama’s seventh district has elected Black representatives continuously since 1993. District two, the new “crab claw” configuration at the center of the fight, has no incumbent — its current form has never produced an election, and every primary cycle since 2023 has been shadowed by the question of whether the boundaries it uses will survive to general election day.

Today’s three-district primary proceeds without that uncertainty. But the four districts that didn’t vote Monday won’t have that clarity until the courts finish working through an argument that the Supreme Court’s unsigned order didn’t resolve.

Polls close across Alabama at 7 p.m. Central time.