A case that could flip the balance of political power in Alabama’s largest county is now before a federal judge.

Plaintiffs say the Jefferson County commission’s current five-district map illegally packs Black voters into two districts, unfairly diluting their influence elsewhere.

Currently, the five districts are solidly partisan and generally divided by race, with three white, Republican members and two Black, Democratic commissioners.

A ruling could shuffle county leadership, with implications for taxes, finances, development and services. Jefferson County has about 674,000 people.

Kathryn Sadasivan of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, one of the plaintiffs, described the current maps for District 1 and District 2 as having “tendrils” that extend out to collect an overabundance of Black residents.

The map does so in extreme excess of what is needed to create the court-ordered majority minority districts from nearly 40 years ago, Sadasivan said.

For the county, attorney Taylor Meehan defended the maps as a continuation of lines drawn as the result of a 1986 consent decree that ordered district lines to give Black voters a chance at representation.

Meehan said several factors went into the district lines, including making sure Birmingham was the population center for Districts 1 and 2. She added that the lines continued to extend to make up for population loss to ensure the districts were evenly split.

“We absolutely dispute the facts that there were specific racial targets in the redistricting,” said Meehan, whose Chicago-based firm, Consovoy McCarthy, who was hired by the county to lead the defense team.

Teams of lawyers for activists and the Jefferson County Commission made their arguments Thursday before Judge Madeline Haikala during a hearing that lasted about five hours.

Haikala set a trial date for Jan. 13. She previously allowed the case to proceed in court over the objections of the county.

However, in her questioning, Haikala specifically noted that District 2, represented by Commissioner Sheila Tyson, has more Black voters than the number required to make it a majority minority district.

“I’m counting that as circumstantial evidence that the court can consider,” Haikala said.

Some arguments in the Jefferson County case are similar to the Alabama case that was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that the state’s congressional map was unfair to Black voters.

The national ruling ultimately led to new federal voting maps that ushered in Shomari Figures of Mobile as the second Democratic member of Alabama’s incoming congressional delegation.

Plaintiffs in the case include the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, Metro-Birmingham Branch of the NAACP, Greater Birmingham Ministries, and residents Cara McClure, Alexia Addoh-Kondi, Cynthia Bonner, Ja’Nelle Brown, Eric Hall, Michael Hansen, Julia Juarez, Charles Long, William Muhammad, Fred Lee Randall, Tammie Smith and Robert Walker.