When state Rep. Daniel Boman ran for the legislature in 2010, it was a lot easier for him to picture Alabama House District 16 in his head. You could pretty much pull any Alabama History text book from a high school library shelf and see the boundaries - Lamar and Fayette counties - on the map on one of the first few pages.

But when running for reelection four years later, after the Alabama Legislature redrew the lines in 2012, he had to learn a different district.

Half of Lamar County has been cut from the district. In its place was added northeast Tuscaloosa County and northwest Jefferson County. Boman lives in Sulligent, about three miles from the Mississippi line, but his district now stretches half the width of the state, all the way to Gardendale.

"For me to cover that much geography is tough," Boman said Tuesday going into a an Election Day fight he would ultimately lose. "The other part is just trying to figure just what part I represented."

Not only does the district now divide several counties, but the district lines split communities in those counties, too. For instance, depending on where someone lives in Mount Olive, they could live in one of two different districts. That makes it difficult for a candidate reaching out to voters on a much longer campaign trail, Boman said.

"It would take me close to six hours non-stop just to drive around my district," he said. "In 2010 it would take me three."

Next week, lawyers for the State of Alabama will have to defend those lines, among many others, when it argues the 2012 redistricting before the United States Supreme Court. The Alabama Legislative Black Caucus has challenged the new lines in court, and although a lower court ruled in the state's favor, the high court has agreed to hear the case.

The plaintiffs in the case have argued that the court's decision could determine how legislative districting works in the 21st Century, and if the court rules in the plaintiffs' favor, it could even potentially force a do-over election within the next two years.

Meanwhile, the redistricting case turns again on how Alabama politics deals with race, leaves many voters with no choices in general elections and makes the state even more politically polarized than before.

Impact on Alabama

Boman is something of an oddity today in Alabama politics. He's a white Democrat running in a competitive race against a Republican. Four years ago, he was on the other side of the partisan divide, but after butting heads with the Republican leadership in Montgomery during his first session there, he switched parties.

The next year the Republican majority dramatically changed the shape of his district. Did his party switch have anything to do with it?

"Yeah," he said Tuesday. "I think it's safe to say that it did."

Legislative redistricting is an inherently political process, and while it seems that today a computer algorithm or Google could draw a better map, decades of court decisions and political tradition are what drive the decision-making.

In its filings with the U.S. Supreme Court, the Alabama Attorney General's Office has candidly argued that the redistricting was meant to favor incumbents. Previous court rulings have said, more or less, that is how the game is played.

But Democrats have argued that the 2012 redistricting didn't just favor incumbents. Instead, it overly packed black voters who have typically and consistently voted for Democrats into existing "majority-minority districts."

Since the Voting Rights Act passed, the courts have allowed majority-minority districts as a remedy for minority representation in government. States are all but expected to draw some districts that guarantee minorities will be able to elect their own. The practice has been called "one person, one vote," and before the U.S. Supreme Court scuttled Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, it was a benchmark for the U.S. Justice Department when deciding whether redistricting unfairly impacted minority voters.

In its defense of the 2012 redistricting, the state has argued that the plan was approved by Justice Department before the high court's decision on the Voting Rights Act negated that requirement. The plaintiffs have argued that the Justice Department's preclearance is beside the point and that, when drawing majority-minority districts, Alabama Republicans went too far.

For instance, the latest redistricting drew more than 15,000 voters into state Sen. Quinton Ross's Montgomery district, but only 36 of those voters were white.

In testimony and depositions, at least one Democratic lawmaker, state Sen. Vivian Davis-Figures, said she wanted more white voters in her district.

But throughout the state, the redistricting went decidedly the other way.

Packing black voters into existing majority black districts dilutes Democrats' support in the adjacent districts, making them less party-competitive, the plaintiffs have argued.

What choice?

Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard (pictured) and Alabama Senate Pro Tem Del Marsh argued in a brief filed with the court that Democrats are trying to turn a political issue into a legal one. (Julie Bennett/al.com)

But beyond making races party less competitive, the practice of redistricting by race has made Alabama decidedly polarized and left voters with fewer choices on Election Day. Throughout the state, candidates from one party or the other will coast across the line this year with no credible opposition or no opponent at all.

And with an Alabama Democratic Party that's already feeble, that polarization has left even some statewide races uncontested.

State Rep. Chris England, and Democrat from Tuscaloosa, is one of those candidates without opposition, but on Tuesday, he said that the districting can hurt the political process when lawmakers get to Montgomery. He says the current plan could turn the Voting Rights Act on its head.

"The way the districts have been drawn have created a quarantine for the amount of representation African Americans have had and will have in the future," he said. "Because of that there are fewer of the kinds of coalitions that are needed to work across the aisle in the legislature."

The impact on Montgomery politics is often overblown by the media, England said, focusing on a few divisive issues rather than the lion's share of legislation that receives bipartisan support.

"Nobody writes about it when we change the way we regulate funeral homes and cemeteries," he said.

Rep. Patricia Todd, whose constituency stands out as among the most diverse in the state, agreed. A Democrat from Birmingham, Todd did not sign onto the plaintiff's case because she said she didn't think it would make a difference. Instead, Democrats need to change their mission to give Alabamians something to vote for, she said.

"Things are the way they are because the state is very red," she said. "I think the Democrats in the legislature need a new game plan other than just opposing the Republicans, because people are sick of it."

Unintended consequences

While the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the plaintiffs' case, the appeal could potentially backfire before a conservative court that has recently shown little patience with racial quotas and only two years ago stuck down portions of the Voting Rights Act.

It's entirely possible that the court could decide that the representation produced by majority-minority districts is counterfeit diversity and a remedy that has outlived its usefulness.

Or as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a school desegregation case in 2007, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

In a joint brief filed with the court earlier this year, State Senate Pro Tem Del Marsh and Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard argued that the plaintiffs' case is a "political dispute masquerading as a legal controversy."

"This case is not about race or even civil rights issues generally; rather it is about the Alabama Democratic Party's loss of 136 years of uninterrupted legislative power," they wrote. "As their party affiliation rapidly declined, Democratic Party leaders pulled out all the stops in 2001 to create what they publically touted as the perfect political gerrymander."

The Republican leaders and the state's attorneys argue that it was Democrats that first used gerrymandering to put their collective thumb on the political scales. The Republican 2012 redistricting is the cure, not the disease.

In particular, Democrats underpopulated majority-minority districts, leaving them, in effect, over represented in the Alabama Legislature.

Indeed, the 2001 redistricting used a looser standard, although it is a standard that the courts have accepted in the past. First the legislature determined the ideal district population and then drew districts that could vary from that ideal by plus or minus 5 percent. That standard, the plaintiffs argued, allowed the state to draw district lines that avoided splitting cities and counties unnecessarily.

The Republican's 2012 plan used a stricter 1 percent variance that keeps districts more equal by population but also causes problematic divisions, such as the community of Mount Olive being split between two House Districts, or Lauderdale County being divided among four.

If the court finds in the state's favor, that kind of districting could become the norm throughout the country.

And if it rules in favor of the plaintiffs?

According to Edward Still, one of the plaintiffs' attorneys, it could force Alabama to have a do-over election.

"The court will probably rule on this sometime late next spring, which is almost too late to do anything in 2015," he said. "If it's remanded back to the lower court, The big thing to look for is what they say is wrong and what they say is the remedy.

Depending on what the court says, the legislature could have to draw new lines to appease the U.S. Supreme Court's concerns, and another election could follow as soon as 2016.