Alabama is appealing a federal court’s Monday order that it must use two redrawn state Senate districts in upcoming elections because the map originally drawn by lawmakers packed Black voters into one district, limiting their influence in others.
U.S. District Judge Anna Manasco’s order said the new map will be used in the 2026 and 2030 state Senate elections, and any special elections, until new lines are drawn by the Legislature after the 2030 census.
The new map impacts Senate District 25, currently held by Sen. Will Barfoot, R-Pike Road, and Senate District 26, held by Sen. Kirk Hatcher, D-Montgomery. It stretches Hatcher’s district into Elmore County, while giving Barfoot more of Montgomery.
In a written statement Tuesday evening, the Alabama Attorney General’s Office said it wants to see the ruling overturned.
“We have appealed the court’s ruling and are optimistic that the Supreme Court will restore the self-evident principle of equal protection for every voter and curb the cynical use of the Voting Rights Act by plaintiffs seeking race-based gerrymanders to help the Democratic Party,” the statement said.
Manasco, a President Donald Trump appointee, ordered a special master to redraw the districts last month. She previously ruled the current state Senate map violated the Voting Rights Act by illegally diluting the influence of Black voters around the capital city.
The ruling stems from a 2021 lawsuit that said in Montgomery, Black voters were unnecessarily packed into a single district, preventing them from influencing elections elsewhere, while white voters in the majority-Black city of Montgomery were “surgically” extracted into another district.
The Associated Press reported that court-appointed special master Richard Allen had cautioned in an earlier court filing that the plan only “weakly remedies” the Voting Rights Act violation. Manasco wrote the plan does enough to fix the violation while leaving most voters and district lines untouched.
The civil rights groups that had filed the lawsuit that led to the redistricting order had objected to the selected plan. Lawyers for plaintiffs said the plan creates an opportunity district in Senate District 25 “at the expense of the existing opportunity in SD26.”
“Although in Plan 3 Black-preferred candidates win around 89% of the time in SD25, such candidates win less than 50% of the time in SD26,” lawyers for plaintiffs wrote in an Oct. 31 court filing. They added that the analysis of past elections showed that Black candidates “almost never win in SD26.”
Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen had also objected to the selected plan.