![]() ![]() ![]() Last year, when the three-judge district court panel that heard the Alabama case struck down the GOP's map, it gave lawmakers the opportunity to come up with a new one. We also can’t say for sure who will even get to draw it. It will still be some time before we have a new map officially in place, though, and we can't predict its precise contours, though there’s a good chance it will resemble one of the plaintiffs' offerings. (In the maps above, the Birmingham district is shown in gray and retains the number 7, while the Montgomery district is in green and would be numbered the 2nd.) In every version, both would be home to a Black majority, and both would very likely elect Black voters' preferred candidates to Congress-almost certainly Black Democrats, like the current representative for the 7th District, Terri Sewell. ![]() Instead, the plaintiffs' maps have Birmingham and Montgomery each anchor their own districts while dividing the Black Belt between the two. At the same time, Republicans carved up the Black Belt, a rural region home to many African Americans, between three districts, using a portion of it to link Birmingham and Montgomery. The plaintiffs' general approach would decouple the cities of Birmingham and Montgomery, two locales with large Black populations that Republicans deliberately merged into the current 7th District in order to reduce Black voting strength elsewhere-the very type of discrimination that the VRA was designed to thwart. (You can also find interactive versions here.) Four of those maps, created by Tufts professor Moon Duchin, are shown in this illustration. Together, they drew 11 hypothetical maps of the state's seven congressional districts showing that a second Black-majority district could easily be crafted. The Alabama challengers, a group of voters backed by the state NAACP, hired two experts to do just that. In order to prove their claims under the relevant provision of the VRA (known as Section 2), plaintiffs in Alabama and elsewhere must draw illustrative maps demonstrating that the minority group in question is both large enough and sufficiently geographically compact such that its members can form a majority in a reasonably drawn district. And we already have a good sense of what these new districts might look like. ![]()
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