I think the general problem....the 7th district....big chunk of area west of Birmingham...is heavily black (57-percent). The only way to make this 2nd ‘out-of-thin-air’ black district....is by carving a chunk of the 7th off and giving it over to the 6th district (just east of Birmingham), which has 20-percent blacks at this point.
Or you could carve off enough of the 7th to give to the 1st (Mobile region), but their current black population is only at 28-percent....so it’d take another big chunk of black voters to rebuild the 1st, and thus lessen the strength of black voters in the 7th.
No matter how you do it....the 7th will be marginally black-voter based in the end, and thus lose it’s democratic ‘character’.
Right now, AL7 combines Birmingham & Montgomery.
Per the plaintiffs on this lawsuit, Birmingham would be its own district (D+24) and Montgomery and Mobile would be connected to create a 2nd (D+11) with rest of the state averaging R+55.
Ah I see Alabama only has 1 Democrat district out of the 7 they have. Yep this is a garbage method to give dems more seats.
Shouldn’t all the districts be drawn as proportional to the society? So if blacks are 30% they should have no more than 30% in a district.
you simply divide the current black district into 2, and combine to the other smallest white districts.