It is by a narrow majority of five judges out of nine that the temple of American law refused, Thursday, to validate a map of the electoral districts adopted by the elected Republicans in Alabama. The Supreme Court of the United States refused in passing to unravel the great civil rights law of 1965 a little more, to the relief of associations for the defense of minorities.
“A great victory”
This text, the Voting Rights Act, was adopted to prevent former segregationist states from depriving African-Americans of the right to vote, but has been emptied in recent years of part of its substance by the High Court.
This file was perceived as a new attempt to weaken it. Beyond the debate on its map, Alabama had tried to convince the Supreme Court to change its case law, which prohibits diluting the votes of black voters by concentrating them in a limited number of constituencies to reduce their influence elsewhere.
Read also: United States: In Selma, Joe Biden commemorates a civil rights march that “forced America to act”
By agreeing to take up his appeal, the high court seemed ready to give him reason. During the hearing, the progressive judge Elena Kagan was moved: “The Voting Rights Act is one of the great advances of our democracy (…) What will be left of it?” The “new approach” proposed by Alabama “is not convincing either in theory or in practice”, however decided Thursday the head of the court John Roberts, on behalf of the majority.
This was to say that the Constitution prohibits taking into account racial criteria to assess whether the constituencies were cut to minimize the weight of black voters. “The Supreme Court has rejected the Orwellian idea that it is inappropriate to consider racial criteria to determine the existence of racial discrimination,” said Davin Rosborough, lawyer for the powerful civil rights organization ACLU, in hailing “a great victory” for African-American voters.
Concretely, the Republican authorities of Alabama will therefore have to review a map drawn in 2021 to allocate the seats in the House of Representatives. On this division, black voters, who vote mostly Democratic, were in the majority in only one of the seven constituencies of the state, while they represent 27% of its population. The new map also passed through the middle of a predominantly black region, the “Black Belt”, and cut it in half.
Under the Supreme Court’s decision, authorities will have to create a second constituency with a majority of African-American voters.
2023-06-08 16:58:09
#United #States #Supreme #Court #grants #victory #AfricanAmerican #voters
