Allen v. Milligan
In Allen v. Milligan (2023), the U.S. Supreme Court found that the Alabama State Legislature likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) when it redrew the state’s congressional district map after the 2020 Census. The decision followed a two-year process and reshaped Alabama’s congressional map in the lead-up to the 2024 elections. As a result of the new congressional map, Alabama elected two Democratic congressional representatives for the first time since 2008. The lead plaintiff in the case was Montgomery native Evan Milligan, an attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative, and the lead defendant was Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen.
The initial lawsuit against the state of Alabama began after the state legislature modified the congressional boundaries for the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2021. Like most states, the Alabama state legislature redraws the state’s congressional map every 10 years after the federal census. Although not mandated by the U.S. Constitution, this practice became commonplace across the country after the precedent set in Baker v. Carr (1962) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964), two significant Supreme Court cases that required equal population in congressional districts and allowed federal courts to review redistricting cases. The redistricting process generates partisan conflict in most states because the political party in control of a given state’s legislature engages in gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is a process by which a state legislature redistricts in such a way as to ensure one party’s control. This process can apply to their state legislatures and their congressional districts. In the South, particularly during the Jim Crow era, many state governments drew district lines to undercut or limit the political influence of Black voters and other minority groups.
When the Alabama state legislature issued its new congressional district map in 2021, a coalition of Alabama voters and the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP filed a lawsuit against the state government. The lawsuit claimed that the map violated Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of color or race, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law. They argued that the map constituted racial gerrymandering by diluting the voting power of Black voters because it contained only one majority Black congressional district out of seven. In Alabama, as in many states, Black voters tend to primarily support the Democratic Party.
The lead plaintiff in the case was Montgomery native Evan Milligan. He studied law at New York University and after graduating worked at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery. Milligan has spent much of his career working for various civic groups that seek to expand and protect voting rights. The defendant in the case was originally Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill and the case was titled Merrill v Milligan, but his term ended in January 2023, and he was succeeded by Wes Allen.
In January 2022, a district court found that the redistricting violated the VRA and ordered new boundaries to be drawn with two majority Black districts. The state of Alabama appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. In February 2022, citing that it was an election year, the Supreme Court stayed the district court’s injunction and allowed the 2022 election to be held using the redistricting map in question. The 2022 election resulted in six of Alabama’s seven congressional seats going to Republican candidates and one to the Democratic candidate, Terri Sewell, in the reliably Democratic Seventh District.
The Supreme Court began to hear oral arguments for the case in October 2022. The plaintiffs argued that the map diluted the voting strength of Black voters, and the state maintained that the map was race neutral. In June 2023, the Court ruled in a 5-4 majority that Alabama likely violated the VRA. Two conservative Supreme Court justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in the majority. Four conservative justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch, dissented.
The state legislature issued a new map in July 2023 that included one Black majority district, the already Black-majority Seventh District, and increased the proportion of Black voters in a second district, Alabama’s Second District. Gov. Kay Ivey approved the map later that month. In the Second District, the percentage of voting-age Black residents was less than 40 percent and in the Seventh Congressional District, the percentage of voting-age Black residents was 50.6 percent. Upon review, the District Court rejected it in September 2023 and appointed a special master to redraw the districts. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall filed a request for a stay against the rejection of the legislature’s revised map to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the Court denied the request. After a few months, the special master submitted three different maps to the court, one of which, Remedial Plan 3, the District Court approved on October 5, 2023. In Remedial Plan 3, the percentage of voting-age Black residents in the redrawn Second District was 48.7 percent, whereas the percentage of voting-age Black residents in the redrawn Seventh District was 51.9 percent.
The redistricting significantly affected the 2024 general election, in which two districts, the Second and Seventh, elected Democrats to the House of Representatives, marking the first time since 2008 that the state has elected more than one Democrat in its congressional delegation. The Second District elected Shomari Figures by nine percentage points, and the Seventh District reelected incumbent Terri Sewell by a two-one margin. Republican Barry Moore, formerly representing the Second District, defeated incumbent Republican Jerry Carl in the substantially redrawn First District primary and was elected by a four-one margin in the general election.
In May 2025, a three-judge court of the Northern District of Alabama ruled that the map approved by the Alabama Legislature in 2023 violates the VRA and the Fourteenth Amendment and cannot be used.
