Allen v. Milligan
The Supreme Court ruled that Alabama's 2022 congressional map likely violated the Voting Rights Act by limiting Black voters — roughly 27% of the state — to just one of the state's seven congressional districts, even though a compact second majority-Black district could be drawn.
The decision preserves the nearly 40-year-old legal test for proving racial vote dilution, rejects Alabama's attempt to replace it with a computer-generated 'race-neutral benchmark,' and requires Alabama to redraw its map before future elections.
How it got here: Three groups of Alabama voters sued to block a new congressional map; a three-judge federal district court blocked the map as likely violating the Voting Rights Act; the Supreme Court stayed that order pending review, took up both cases, and now affirms.
The Case in Depth
What happened
After the 2020 census, Alabama redrew its seven congressional districts, keeping only one — District 7 — as majority-Black, even though Black Alabamians make up about 27% of the state's population. Three groups of Black voters and civil rights plaintiffs challenged the new map, arguing it diluted Black political power by dispersing concentrated Black communities — particularly in the Black Belt region and urban areas like Montgomery and Mobile — across multiple districts rather than allowing them to form a majority in a second district.
The question before the Court
Does Alabama's congressional map — which gave Black voters, about 27% of the state's population, only one of seven majority-Black districts — likely violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act?
The Court's answer
Yes — the Court ruled that Alabama's map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and upheld the lower court's order blocking its use. Applying the long-settled Gingles framework, the Court found all three threshold conditions satisfied: plaintiffs produced eleven illustrative maps showing a second compact majority-Black district was feasible, Black voters in Alabama voted cohesively for their preferred candidates at a 92.3% rate, and white voters backed Black-preferred candidates at only 15.4% — evidence of severe racially polarized voting that Alabama's own expert did not seriously contest.
The Court declined Alabama's invitation to replace the Gingles framework with a new "race-neutral benchmark" requiring courts to compare a state's map against a statistical average derived from millions of computer-generated, race-blind maps. That approach, the Court held, cannot be squared with Section 2's demand that courts weigh the totality of circumstances, would inject technically complex and essentially unresolvable computer contests into voting-rights litigation, and misreads decades of settled law.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Alabama must draw a new congressional map that gives Black voters a real chance to elect a second representative of their choice. Other states with similarly large and geographically concentrated minority populations face the same scrutiny. The ruling keeps the Voting Rights Act as an active check on congressional mapmaking in states with documented histories of racial discrimination in voting.
What changes now
Alabama must redraw its congressional map. The case returns to lower courts, which will oversee a remedial plan that gives Black voters a genuine opportunity to elect a second representative of their choice. The Supreme Court does not dictate the precise shape of any new map — that will be worked out through further lower-court proceedings, likely involving court-supervised mapmaking. The Court's ruling is final on the core legal question.
What this does not decide
The decision does not specify what a remedial map must look like; only that Alabama's current map is unlawful. The Court also leaves open whether Section 2 contains a private right of action — the Thomas dissent flags it was not raised. The ruling does not address how other states should draw their maps or resolve broader debates about the long-term constitutionality of race-conscious redistricting remedies.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Kavanaugh
Justice Kavanaugh agreed that Alabama's map violates Section 2 under Gingles and joined the judgment, but declined to join Part III-B-1's analysis of whether race predominated in plaintiffs' illustrative maps. He wrote separately to emphasize four points: statutory precedents like Gingles deserve especially strong stare decisis because Congress can change them; Gingles does not mandate racial proportionality; Section 2 is an effects test, not an intent test; and Alabama's constitutional challenge fails under precedent, though he flagged — but declined to address — Justice Thomas's argument that race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely.
Dissent — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas argued first that Section 2 does not apply to redistricting at all — its text targets ballot-access rules, not choices among district lines. Even if it does, the Gingles framework lacks any principled, race-neutral benchmark and inevitably collapses into racial proportionality, which Section 2 expressly disclaims and the Constitution forbids. He would hold Section 2, as applied to redistricting by the district court, unconstitutional, and called for abandoning the Court's four-decade vote-dilution jurisprudence entirely.
Dissent — Justice Alito
Justice Alito accepted the Gingles framework but argued the district court misapplied the first precondition. A plaintiff's illustrative map must be shown to have been drawn without race playing a predominant role — a requirement the district court ignored. Because the plaintiffs' experts treated drawing two majority-Black districts as 'non-negotiable,' race necessarily predominated in their maps. He would vacate and remand for the district court to apply the correct non-predominance test to the illustrative districts.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied the Gingles framework — the 37-year-old test for Section 2 vote-dilution claims — which has three threshold conditions: the minority must be large and geographically compact enough to form a majority in a reasonably drawn district; minority voters must be politically cohesive; and the white majority must vote as a bloc to regularly defeat minority-preferred candidates. Only after all three are met does a court weigh the totality of circumstances to determine whether the political process is equally open.
- The extensive trial record supported all three conditions. Plaintiffs produced eleven illustrative maps showing a second compact majority-Black district could be drawn while respecting traditional criteria like contiguity, equal population, and county lines. Black voters supported their preferred candidates with 92.3% cohesion; white voters backed Black-preferred candidates at only 15.4%. Alabama's own expert conceded that white-preferred candidates regularly defeated Black voters' preferred candidates — unchallenged findings the Court declined to disturb on review.
- The Court rejected Alabama's 'race-neutral benchmark' theory, which would require courts to compare a state's map against a median or average derived from millions of computer-generated, race-blind maps. Section 2 calls for weighing the totality of circumstances — not a single algorithmic figure. Courts must focus on the specific illustrative maps plaintiffs produce; the universe of possible district maps is effectively infinite ('at least in the trillion trillions'), making any reliable race-neutral benchmark comparison unworkable.
- The Court also rejected the argument that the Gingles framework inevitably mandates racial proportionality in violation of Section 2(b)'s explicit disclaimer against a right to proportional representation. The traditional districting criteria embedded in the first Gingles precondition — compactness, contiguity, equal population, respect for political subdivisions — already act as meaningful guardrails. States where minority populations are geographically dispersed often cannot satisfy those criteria, which is why Section 2 redistricting suits have rarely succeeded in recent years.
- Finally, the Court reaffirmed that Section 2 applies to single-member district redistricting, relying on 40 years of consistent precedent that Congress is aware of and has not changed — a strong basis for adherence to settled statutory law. The Court also rejected Alabama's argument that the Fifteenth Amendment prohibits Section 2's effects-based test, pointing to prior decisions holding that Congress can ban voting practices that are discriminatory in effect as an appropriate way to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Thornburg v. Gingles (478 U.S. 30)
The Court explicitly upholds the 37-year-old Gingles three-precondition test as the governing framework for all Section 2 redistricting claims.