Well now, this ought to be interesting: A federal lawsuit has been filed charging that Alabama’s three highest courts—the state Supreme Court, Court of Civil Appeals and the Court of Criminal Appeals—violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because their benches consist of all-white judges. The Alabama State Conference of the NAACP is representing the plaintiffs, four black residents of the state who say that the culprit is at-large races with partisan primaries.
The plaintiffs are demanding the federal district court in Montgomery divide the state up into districts that each elect a member of the state’s Supreme Court and appellate courts. That way, the few sections of the state with majority-black populations have a chance at electing a judge of their choice to the courts. They hope the court will force the state to make this change by 2017 or 2018.
The lawsuit notes that since 1994, every African American candidate that has run for any of the three top courts has lost to a white candidate. Only two black judges have ever been elected to the state Supreme Court, and zero have served on either the Court of Criminal Appeals or the Court of Civil Appeals in the entirety of the state’s history.
Not to get too far off topic, but the at-large system of voting recently came under fire in Ferguson, Missouri, where a judge halted local school board elections for the same reason—at-large voting dilutes the ability of black communities to elect representatives from those communities. Back to Alabama:
At-large elections have been a common tactic across the country to prevent minority groups from achieving political representation. In Alabama in the mid-1980s, courts found that more than 200 jurisdictions were using at-large elections to strip black voters of political power.
“In the century following Reconstruction,” a court found amid that series of cases, “the Alabama Legislature had purposefully switched from single-member districts to the at-large election of local governments to prevent African-American citizens from electing candidates of their choice, and that the general laws of Alabama governing at-large election systems throughout the state had been manipulated intentionally during the 1950s and 1960s to strengthen their ability to dilute African-American voting strength.”
We will report on this lawsuit as it makes its way through the court system.