Jefferson County officials must redraw the County Commission districts prior to the 2026 elections and that decision will not be affected by an appeal, a federal judge ruled last week.
U.S. District Judge Madeline Haikala , having ruled two weeks ago that the district lines are unfairly drawn based on race, denied Jefferson County officials’ request to delay redrawing the lines until an appeal could be filed.
In her ruling, Haikala said that while redrawing the districts prior to the 2026 elections would be difficult, given the time constraints, it was more harmful to voters to leave in place districts unfairly drawn. Her decision cites a number of opinions from higher courts, all with the same general theme: “[C]ompliance with federal law is [not] an onerous burden.”
“… the plaintiffs will experience a substantial injury if the Commission conducts the 2026 election under an unconstitutional districting plan,” Haikala wrote. “Racial gerrymandering is a practice that constitutes an ‘immense’ and ‘irreparable’ harm to the voters who are sorted based on their race.”
Haikala also noted in her decision that the Commission’s request for a stay mostly re-argued the points it made at trial – arguments that Haikala found unpersuasive, even though she approached the trial giving the Commission the benefit of the doubt that it sought to draw fair districts that weren’t based on race.
In the end, though, she said Jefferson County failed to address “the more than 200 specific factual findings in this court’s decision.”
