Alabama tabulated four congressional primaries on Tuesday 19 May 2026 whose results Governor Kay Ivey announced will be declared legally void. The 1st, 2nd, 6th and 7th district contests drew 2.4 million eligible voters under maps the state intends to discard. The US Supreme Court vacated the lower-court order requiring a second majority-Black congressional district on Monday 11 May, clearing Louisiana v. Callais to take operational effect inside Alabama. Ivey scheduled a re-do special primary for Tuesday 11 August under the redrawn map.
The redrawn map removes the seat held by Representative Shomari Figures, the Democrat elected in 2024 from Mobile as only the second Black congressman from Alabama in the state's modern history1. No post-Voting Rights Act precedent exists for a state legislature voluntarily annulling an election already in progress under its own redrawn lines. Alabama was among the four states that called post-Callais redistricting sessions in late April; today is what one of those resolutions looks like in practice.
The 11 May order was not a merits ruling on the new Alabama map. the Court vacated the existing remedial requirement on the strength of Callais and remanded, which is the procedurally smallest move that produces this outcome. Other states with pending Section 2 challenges, Louisiana and Georgia among them, will read the precedent. NAACP Legal Defense Fund counsel, cited by NPR, argued the opposite reading: the remand still permits the district court to reinstate the majority-Black requirement on the merits; nothing in the 11 May order forecloses that path before 11 August.
The broader pattern compresses the candidate fundraising window for the redrawn 7th district to roughly ten weeks. Figures-style coalitions must now hold a district without Section 2 protection, on a map drawn precisely to disperse the Black voters that Section 2 had clustered. That is the operational test the August primary will run.
