Democrats file objections to redistricting map in federal court

Brian Lyman | Montgomery Advertiser

Show Caption Hide Caption Alabama's redistricting fight: A brief history Alabama's redistricting battle has gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. It's up to the Alabama Legislature to resolve the matter.

Organizations aligned with Alabama Democrats on Tuesday filed formal objections to a redistricting plan, saying it unconstitutionally split up Jefferson County.

The filing, long-promised by Democrats in the House and the Senate, says that the redistricting map approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature last month improperly allows two representatives and one senator who live outside Jefferson County to weigh in on that local government’s decisions.

“There is no nonracial excuse for the Legislature’s refusal to reduce the number of majority-white House and Senate districts extending outside Jefferson County into surrounding counties when eight majority-black House districts and three majority-black Senate districts are contained wholly within Jefferson County,” the filing states.

A federal court in January ruled that 12 of the state’s House and Senate districts were unconstitutional. The court said legislators in 2012 improperly used race in determining the makeup of the districts. Democrats who sued to overturn the maps said they moved black voters, who tend to vote for Democratic candidates into a handful of districts, making it difficult for them to form alliances with like-minded white voters and muting their voices in the process.

Republican said they were trying to maintain minority percentages in the districts while making up for population losses many majority-minority districts experienced between 2001 and 2010. The maps approved last month reduced racial polarization in the some of the districts. But Democrats said they kept the same boundary lines.

Democrats also objected to the GOP holding a one-seat advantage in the Jefferson County House and Senate delegations, noting that the numbers were achieved by drawing people who live outside Jefferson County into it. Democrats sought political parity in the county. GOP legislators argued they couldn’t achieve it without splitting other counties. The plaintiffs acknowledged that in their brief but argued a redistricting committee rejected an earlier proposal that they argued would have kept the counties whole.

The plaintiffs asked the court to use their plan in place of the legislative one, or order the drawing of new maps. Republicans had no responded to the filing as of early Tuesday afternoon.