In June, the Supreme Court struck down the formula that had identified places, based on 40-year-old data, that would be required to obtain permission from federal authorities before changing voting procedures. The court suggested that Congress remained free to enact a new coverage formula based on contemporary data, but most analysts say that is unlikely.

But the ruling left Section 3 in place, allowing federal courts to impose oversight on given states and localities based on a showing that they had committed intentional constitutional violations.

Court orders under Section 3 are hard to obtain and are often limited in scope, Mr. Tanner said. “Plaintiffs need to exhaust considerable resources — if they have, which is rare — before they can gain what amounts to a level playing field,” he said.

Evergreen, an enclave of 3,900 people between Mobile and Montgomery, has a troubled history and has in recent years been found to have improperly excluded minority voters from its rolls and redrawn its district lines to concentrate black voters, who are in the majority, into just two of the five districts, limiting black voting power.

Jerome Gray, a civil rights activist in Evergreen, said the court’s order was welcome and valuable.

“It gives us at least some leverage in terms of the next couple of election cycles,” he said, “so that they can’t get away with doing things with impunity now that we don’t have Section 5,” the part of the Voting Rights Act effectively eliminated by the Supreme Court.