Would the 2nd district in the Alabama Senate be a VRA violation?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

This is the main Huntsville-based seat and while it doesn't look gerrymandered it's actually a pretty insidious one.


The city of Huntsville is about 1.25x the size of a district, although this is largely due to its odd shape, if you include Madison which is almost completely surrounded by the city you get a an area that's just under twice the size of a district. Thus the city is split by making the 2nd a good chunk of Huntsville and almost all of Madison, meanwhile the 7th east of it takes most of the Huntsville black neighborhoods and links it to rural areas southeast and north of the city. The border between the 2nd and 7th is in the black area, and the 2nd could easily extend east, or the 7th west and lose the rural area. But because of the split the 2nd is a district that voted for Trump by a hair (0.54%, closest district in Alabama), and the 7th voted for Trump by 9 points. Both are represented by Republicans.

It's hard to not see as an intentional attempt to split and dilute the black vote in an area that has a clear concentrated black population.