This case is about Alabama Republicans trying to disregard race in setting up Contressional districts…
They want to have the ability to scatter black voting districts into white Republican ones to neutralise black voter power…
With a view towards the Alito 5?
Could efforts to have fair voting access be the next thing on the chopping block?
I mean these judges seem to be a rush to go backwards step by step….
Giving state powers from the Fedral Government attempt to centralise ‘Rights’ for ALL its citizens….
Law by Law…..
The diminished Voting Rights Act has already played a key role, in its absence, in the 2022 elections. Three states that were previously covered by preclearance requirements — Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana — have all seen their maps face significant challenges in federal court over whether or not they give Black voters adequate representation.
Federal judges threw out Alabama’s map in the spring, but it was reinstated for 2022 by the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 that it was too close to the election to draw a new map. A federal judge in Georgia wrote in another case that the state’s map may violate the VRA while letting it stand for 2022, and Louisiana is currently redrawing its map under court order — though the Supreme Court could step in to halt the process, as it did in Alabama.
And in Florida, a federal district judge ruled that an omnibus election law passed in 2021 was so egregious that the state should have to face preclearance requirements going forward, in a process known as “bail in.” (That ruling was also stayed, pending an appeal.)
“I would say that minority voting rights have deteriorated significantly,” said Rick Hasen, a prominent election law expert. “Now with the [Alabama] case … there’s the potential to really undermine Section 2’s use as a tool for minority representation and empowerment.”
The Supreme Court has limited the power of the Voting Rights Act in a series of cases over the last decade. It started with Shelby County in 2013, but two other decisions also played major roles: Abbott v. Perez in 2018, in which the court ruled that state legislators were entitled to a presumption of good faith, and then again last year in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. There, Justice Samuel Alito laid out five so-called guideposts to assess if election laws were discriminatory under Section 2, which voting rights advocates and election attorneys decried as a surprisingly broad decision that would undercut future challenges.
The overall effect, civil rights groups and voting rights attorneys say, has been to shift from preemptive checks on election laws to after-the-fact challenges — cases that are harder to win and also see the legal burden shift to those affected by the laws…..