HOPE HULL, Ala. — Willie Dixon and Mary Gatson are sitting in the fellowship hall of Beulah Primitive Baptist Church in Lowndes County awaiting a Congressional town hall, and discussing the last-minute changes to Alabama’s voting landscape.

“Create enough chaos, and people will give up and go home,” Dixon predicted.

Voters in parts of Alabama will head to the polls today for the second time this primary season. After the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act when it ruled that it’s unconstitutional to draw district lines based on race, Alabama became one of several southern states to rush to redistrict before the mid-term elections to consolidate Republican power.

Less than two weeks before the regular May primary, Alabama’s Republican-controlled state legislature reconfigured four of the state’s seven districts, reshaping a largely-Black district drawn in response to a court decision that ruled the same map being used this year was discriminatory.

Willie Dixon, left, and Mary Gatson came to hear Alabama’s two Black members of Congress speak at a local church on July 30. The ladies are concerned that confusion around congressional boundaries and primary dates may discourage Black voters.

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Dixon thought she was in the same district as before until Gatson told her it changed. Anyone who voted in the first primary here had their votes voided.

“With these two [primaries] coming so close together, I know there will be some people that are not going to show up because they think they’ve already done it,” Dixon said.

Lowndes County is in Alabama’s rural Black Belt — a predominantly African-American region known for its rich black soil. The ladies say they worry the changes will disperse and discourage Black voters, who tend to vote Democratic.

“I think it’s very inappropriate,” Gatson said. “That’s politics though.”

“That’s not fair by no means,” Dixon added. “Never has been.”

They say the fight for representation here is nothing new, pointing to Lowndes County’s strategic location along the Selma to Montgomery voting rights march — a movement that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Democrats aren’t giving up

Democratic Reps. Shomari Figures, left, and Terri Sewell host a community event for voters at the Beulah Primitive Baptist Church in Lowndes County, Ala., on July 30.

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“This is not about no representation or some representation, it’s about fair representation,” said Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell, one of two Black Democrats in Alabama’s seven-member Congressional delegation. The other five are all white Republicans. Black people make up a little over a quarter of the state’s population.