Yesterday, in Alabama Black Caucus v. Alabama, the
Supreme Court issued an important opinion in the field of voting
rights jurisprudence. The question presented to the Court was
whether the Alabama legislature's most recent redistricting
plan—drawn in 2012, after the 2010 census—amounted to
racial gerrymandering in violation of the Equal Protection Clause
of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The gerrymandering claim arose from the plan's treatment of
the "majority-minority" districts that are required by
the Voting Rights Act—districts in which racial minorities
have the ability to elect candidates of their choice. The plan,
drawn by a Republican-dominated legislature, had two key goals: (1)
a population deviation of no more than two percent across districts
(the previous plan had featured deviations of up to ten percent),
and (2) preserving both the percentage of minority members in each
majority-minority district and the total number of
majority-minority districts.
