A federal judge ruled Thursday that some Georgia congressional, Senate and House of Representatives districts were divided in a racially discriminatory manner. He ordered the state to designate an additional black-majority congressional district.

U.S. District Judge Steve Jones also ordered the state in a 516-page order to draw two new black-majority districts in Georgia’s 56-member Senate and five new black-majority districts in the state’s 180-member House .

Jones’ ruling follows an eight-day trial in September in which prosecutors argued that black voters are still fighting opposition from white voters and need federal help to get a fair shot, while the state argued that judicial intervention on behalf of black voters was unnecessary.

Georgia has made great strides toward voting equality since 1965, Jones wrote. However, the evidence before this court shows that Georgia has not yet reached the point where the political process enjoys equal openness and equal opportunity for all.

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Jones ordered Georgia’s Republican-majority General Assembly and governor to take action by December. He said he would redraw districts if lawmakers did not, and that he would not allow the 2024 election to take place in districts he deemed illegitimate. That would require a special session, as lawmakers will reconvene until January.

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Chris Carr, whose office defended the plans in court, declined comment, saying lawyers were still reading the ruling. A spokesperson for Gov. Brian Kemp did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Jones’ order explicitly anticipates an appeal from the state.

A new map could shift one of Georgia’s 14 congressional seats from Republican to Democratic control. Republican lawmakers redrew the congressional map from an 8-6 Republican majority to a 9-5 Republican majority in 2021. Jones ruled that lawmakers could not eliminate minority opportunity districts elsewhere if they redrew the maps.

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“I applaud the district court’s decision ordering Georgia to draw maps that comply with the Voting Rights Act,” said Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler, a Democrat from Stone Mountain. We’d like to help pass fairer cards that comply with federal law.

The Georgia case is part of a wave of lawsuits after the U.S. Supreme Court backed its interpretation of the Voting Rights Act earlier this year and rejected a challenge to the law by Alabama.

Courts in Alabama and Florida recently ruled that Republican-led legislatures had unfairly diluted the voting power of black residents. Legal challenges against congressional districts are also underway in Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.

Orders to create new legislative districts could shrink Republican majorities in the state House, where the Republican Party has a 102-78 lead, and in the Senate, with a 33-23 lead. But on their own, these changes are unlikely to lead to a democratic takeover.

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Jones wrote that he thoroughly and carefully examined the evidence in the case before concluding that Georgia had violated the Voting Rights Act by fixing the current congressional and legislative maps.

The judge wrote that despite the fact that all of the state’s population growth between 2010 and 2020 was attributable to growth among nonwhite populations, the number of Black-majority congressional and legislative districts remained the same.

That reflects a key contention of plaintiffs, who have repeatedly argued that the state has added nearly 500,000 Black residents over the past decade but has attracted no new Black-majority Senate districts and only two additional Black-majority state House districts.

Jones wrote in a footnote that his order in no way states or implies that the General Assembly or Georgia Republicans are racist. The Voting Rights Act does not require him to find that the disputed maps were passed to discriminate against Black voters or that the Legislature is racist, he wrote. Nothing in this order may be construed to indicate otherwise.