Supreme Court of the United States

“ To justify a statute tending toward the proportional allocation of political power by race throughout the Nation, it cannot be enough that a court can recite some indefinite quantum of discrimination in the relevant jurisdiction. ”

“ Quite simply, we have never succeeded in translating the Gingles framework into an objective and workable method of identifying the undiluted benchmark. The second and third preconditions are all but irrelevant to the task. They essentially collapse into one question: Is voting racially polarized such that minority-preferred candidates consistently lose to majority-preferred ones? See Gingles, 478 U. S., at 51. Even if the answer is yes, that tells a court nothing about “how hard it ‘should’ be for minority voters to elect their preferred candidates under an acceptable system.” ”

“ Any vote-dilution benchmark must be race neutral. See Brief for Appellants 32–46. Whatever “equal openness” means in the context of single-member districting, no “meaningful comparison” is possible using a benchmark that builds in a presumption in favor of minority-controlled districts. Indeed, any benchmark other than a race-neutral one would render the vote-dilution inquiry fundamentally circular, allowing courts to conclude that a districting plan “dilutes” a minority’s voting strength “on account of race” merely because it does not measure up to an ideal already defined in racial terms. ”

“ It is hard to imagine many more fundamental “prerequisites” to voting than determining where to cast your ballot or who you are eligible to vote for. Perhaps for that reason, even Alabama does not bear the courage of its conviction on this point. It refuses to argue that §2 is inapplicable to multimember districting, though its textual arguments apply with equal force in that context.
The dissent, by contrast, goes where even Alabama does not dare, arguing that §2 is wholly inapplicable to districting because it “focuses on ballot access and counting” only. ”

“ The plaintiffs prefer that approach because it allows the creation of two majority-black districts, which they think Alabama should have. But even if that approach were reasonable, there is hardly any compelling race-neutral reason to elevate such a plan to a benchmark against which all other plans must be measured. Nothing in Alabama’s geography or demography makes it clearly the best way, or even a particularly attractive way, to draw three of seven equally populous districts. ”

“ To the extent the plurality supposes that, under our precedents, a State may purposefully sort voters based on race to some indefinite extent without crossing the line into predominance, it is wrong, and its predominance analysis would water down decades of racial-gerrymandering jurisprudence. Our constitutional precedents’ line between racial awareness and racial predominance simply tracks the distinction between awareness of consequences, on the one hand, and discriminatory purpose, on the other. ”

“ The plaintiffs’ claims pose one simple question: What is the “right” number of Alabama’s congressional seats that black voters who support Democrats “should” control? Neither the Senate factors nor the Gingles framework as a whole offers any principled answer.
In reality, the limits of the Gingles preconditions and the aimlessness of the totality-of-circumstances inquiry left the District Court only one obvious and readily administrable option: a benchmark of “allocation of seats in direct proportion to the minority group’s percentage in the population.” ”

“ Our reasons for doing so boil down to these: that the plaintiffs’ proposed districts are more or less within the vast universe of reasonable districting outcomes; that Alabama’s white voters do not support the black minority’s preferred candidates; that Alabama’s racial climate, taken as a rarefied whole, crosses some indefinable line justifying our interference; and, last but certainly not least, that black Alabamians are about two-sevenths of the State’s overall population. ”

“ The Constitution is supreme over statutes, not vice versa. Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 178 (1803) . Therefore, if complying with a federal statute would require a State to engage in unconstitutional racial discrimination, the proper conclusion is not that the statute excuses the State’s discrimination, but that the statute is invalid.
If Congress has any power at all to require States to sort voters into congressional districts based on race, that power must flow from its authority to “enforce” the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments “by appropriate legislation.” ”

“ The majority goes to great lengths to decline all of these options and, in doing so, to fossilize all of the worst aspects of our long-deplorable vote-dilution jurisprudence. The majority recites Gingles’ shopworn phrases as if their meaning were self-evident, and as if it were not common knowledge that they have spawned intractable difficulties of definition and application. It goes out of its way to reaffirm §2’s applicability to single-member districting plans both as a purported original matter and on highly exaggerated stare decisis grounds. ”

“ The tendrils with which the various versions of illustrative District 2 would capture black Mobilians are visually striking and are easily recognized as a racial grab against the backdrop of the State’s demography. The District 7 “finger,” which encircles the black population of the Birmingham metropolitan area in order to separate them from their white neighbors and link them with black rural areas in the west of the State, also stands out to the naked eye. ”

“ To explain this, I begin with what is probably the most frequently mentioned traditional districting criterion and ask why it should matter under §2 whether a proposed majority-minority district is “compact.” Neither the Voting Rights Act (VRA) nor the Constitution imposes a compactness requirement. The Court notes that we have struck down bizarrely shaped districts, ante, at 19–20, but we did not do that for esthetic reasons. Compactness in and of itself is not a legal requirement—or even necessarily an esthetic one. ”

“ A district is not equally open, in other words, when minority voters face—unlike their majority peers—bloc voting along racial lines, arising against the backdrop of substantial racial discrimination within the State, that renders a minority vote unequal to a vote by a nonminority voter.
The State’s reading of §2, by contrast, runs headlong into our precedent. Alabama asserts that a State’s map does not “abridge [] ” a person’s right to vote “on account of race” if the map resembles a sufficient number of race-neutral alternatives. ”

“ Perhaps an acceptable system is one in which the minority simply cannot elect its preferred candidates; it is, after all, a minority. Rejecting that outcome as “dilutive” requires a value judgment relative to a benchmark that polarization alone cannot provide.
The first Gingles precondition is only marginally more useful. True, the benchmark in a redistricting challenge must be “a hypothetical, undiluted plan,” Bossier Parish School Bd., 520 U. S., at 480, and the first precondition at least requires plaintiffs to identify some hypothetical alternative plan. ”

“ But Alabama’s premise is wrong. As the Court’s precedents make clear, Gingles does not mandate a proportional number of majority-minority districts. Gingles requires the creation of a majority-minority district only when, among other things, (i) a State’s redistricting map cracks or packs a large and “geographically compact” minority population and (ii) a plaintiff ’s proposed alternative map and proposed majority-minority district are “reasonably configured”—namely, by respecting compactness principles and other traditional districting criteria such as county, city, and town lines. ”

“ The most that they can be said to have shown is that sophisticated mapmakers can proportionally allocate Alabama’s congressional districts based on race in a way that exceeds the Federal Judiciary’s ability to recognize as a racial gerrymander with the naked eye. The District Court held that this showing, plus racially polarized voting and its gestalt view of Alabama’s racial climate, was enough to require the State to redraw its districting plan on the basis of race. ”

“ To be sure, it is no easy task to identify an objective, “undiluted” benchmark against which to judge a districting plan. As we recently held in the analogous context of partisan gerrymandering, “federal courts are not equipped to apportion political power as a matter of fairness.” Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (slip op., at 17) . Yet §2 vote-dilution cases require nothing less. If §2 prohibited only intentional racial discrimination, there would be no difficulty in finding a clear and workable rule of decision. ”

“ Alabama also argues that the race-neutral benchmark is required because our existing §2 jurisprudence inevitably demands racial proportionality in districting, contrary to the last sentence of §2 (b) . But properly applied, the Gingles framework itself imposes meaningful constraints on proportionality, as our decisions have frequently demonstrated.
In Shaw v. Reno, for example, we considered the permissibility of a second majority-minority district in North Carolina, which at the time had 12 seats in the U. S. House of Representatives and a 20% black voting age population. ”

“ Could it be said that the number of stops between the city of origin and the destination was not a “predominant” factor in the search for a good flight? The obvious answer to both these questions is no, and the same is true about the role of race in the creation of a new district. If it is “non-negotiable” that the district be majority black, then race is given a predominant role.
The District Court wrapped up this portion of its opinion with a passage that highlighted its misunderstanding of the first Gingles precondition. ”

“ No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color ... ”

“ In light of that precedent, including City of Rome, we are not persuaded by Alabama’s arguments that §2 as interpreted in Gingles exceeds the remedial authority of Congress.
The concern that §2 may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the States is, of course, not new. See, e.g., Shaw, 509 U. S., at 657 (“Racial gerrymandering, even for remedial purposes, may balkanize us into competing racial factions; it threatens to carry us further from the goal of a political system in which race no longer matters.”) ”

“ But, for the plaintiffs to secure their majority-black District 2, this longstanding, compact, and eminently sensible district must be radically transformed. In the Gulf Coast region, the newly drawn District 1 would retain only the majority-white areas that District 2 did not absorb on its path to Mobile’s large majority-black population. To make up the lost population, District 1 would have to extend eastward through largely majority-white rural counties along the length of Alabama’s border with the Florida panhandle. ”

“ City of Rome, for example, immediately after one of the sentences quoted by the majority, explained the remedial rationale for its approval of the 1975 preclearance extension: “Congress could rationally have concluded that, because electoral changes by jurisdictions with a demonstrable history of intentional racial discrimination in voting create the risk of purposeful discrimination, it was proper to prohibit changes that have a discriminatory impact.” ”

“ Thus, any plan whose predominant purpose is to achieve a nonnegotiable, predetermined racial target in a nonnegotiable, predetermined number of districts is a racial gerrymander subject to strict scrutiny. The precise fraction used as the racial target, and the number of districts it is applied to, are irrelevant.
In affirming the District Court’s nonpredominance finding, the plurality glosses over these plain legal errors, [12] and it entirely ignores Dr. Duchin’s plans—presumably because her own explanation of her method sounds too much like textbook racial predominance. Compare 2 App. ”

“ Throughout these cases, Alabama has repeatedly emphasized that HB1 cannot have violated §2 because none of plaintiffs’ two million odd maps contained more than one majority-minority district. See, e.g., Brief for Alabama 1, 23, 30, 31, 54–56, 70, 79. The point is that two million is a very big number and that sheer volume matters. But as elsewhere, Alabama misconceives the math project that it expects courts to oversee. A brief submitted by three computational redistricting experts explains that the number of possible districting maps in Alabama is at least in the “trillion trillions.” ”

“ And we have explained that “ [i] t is patently clear that Congress has used the words ‘on account of race or color’ in the Act to mean ‘with respect to’ race or color, and not to connote any required purpose of racial discrimination.” Gingles, 478 U. S., at 71, n. 34 (plurality opinion) (some alterations omitted) . Individuals thus lack an equal opportunity to participate in the political process when a State’s electoral structure operates in a manner that “minimize [s] or cancel [s] out the [ir] voting strength.” ”

“ Next, the court observed that black candidates rarely win statewide elections in Alabama and that black state legislators overwhelmingly come from majority-minority districts. The court then reviewed Alabama’s history of racial discrimination, noted other voting-rights cases in which the State was found liable, and cataloged socioeconomic disparities between black and white Alabamians in everything from car ownership to health insurance coverage. ”