The Supreme Court handed Alabama Republicans a victory Tuesday night, allowing the state to use a congressional map in the 2026 midterms that a lower court had ruled discriminatory.
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Fox News reports that, in a 6–3 ruling, the justices granted Alabama’s emergency appeal, allowing the state to use a congressional map adopted by the legislature in 2023 that contains a single majority-black district for the 2026 election cycle.
In a four-page, , the court concluded that that “the District Court’s analysis departed from” the Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which made it harder for plaintiffs to succeed in the challenges alleging that a map violates a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.
The court’s three liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elana Kagan, and Ketanji Brown—dissented.
Alabama Republicans had worked to revive the previously blocked map, which is expected to give the GOP a chance at an additional congressional seat by replacing a court-drawn south Alabama district with a map that contains only one majority-black district.
🚨 The Supreme Court has restored Alabama’s Legislature-drawn congressional map for the 2026 elections, staying a lower court order that had required use of a court-drawn map with a second Black opportunity district. pic.twitter.com/6GIQhB0eH0
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) June 3, 2026
According to SCOTUSblog, Tuesday’s ruling was likely the final chapter in a dispute that began in 2021, when Alabama enacted a new map in the wake of the 2020 census.
That map was challenged in federal court by black voters and civil rights organizations arguing that it violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it divided black voters in the southern part of the state among three different congressional districts, leaving them a minority in each.
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After concluding that the 2021 map likely violated Section 2, the lower court barred Alabama from using the map. Alabama appealed to the Supreme Court, which in 2023 upheld the lower court’s decision.
The ruling came after the Supreme Court last month vacated a lower court ruling blocking Alabama’s 2023 congressional map and sent the case back for further review.
Last week, a three-judge federal panel again blocked the GOP-backed map and ordered Alabama to continue using a court-drawn map containing two districts in which black voters are a majority or have an opportunity to elect their preferred candidates.
SCOTUSblog reports that on Tuesday, the Supreme Court stated that the district court “failed to follow our instruction in Callais that the mere fact that voters of different races vote for different parties is not relevant to proving racially polarized voting patterns.”
The court also held that:
We have repeatedly cautioned that lower federal courts should not ‘alter the election rules on the eve of an election’. Here, the District Court interposed itself into Alabama’s ongoing efforts to conduct its imminent 2026 congressional elections under maps that its elected representatives selected. Its view that conducting the elections under court-imposed maps would be more convenient for the State was not a valid justification for that intervention.
Republican Gov. Kay Ivey celebrated the ruling Tuesday evening and confirmed that Alabama’s August 11 special primary election would be conducted under the 2023 map.
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