Syllabus
As to the second and third Gingles preconditions, the District Court determined that there was “no serious dispute that Black voters are politically cohesive, nor that the challenged districts’ white majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to usually defeat Black voters’ preferred candidate.” The court noted that, “on average, Black voters supported their candidates of choice with 92.3% of the vote” while “white voters supported Black-preferred candidates with 15.4% of the vote.” Even Alabama’s expert conceded “that the candidates preferred by white voters in the areas that he looked at regularly defeat the candidates preferred by Black voters.” Finally, the District Court concluded that plaintiffs had carried their burden at the totality of circumstances stage given the racial polarization of elections in Alabama, where “Black Alabamians enjoy virtually zero success in statewide elections” and where “Alabama’s extensive history of repugnant racial and voting-related discrimination is undeniable and well documented.” The Court sees no reason to disturb the District Court’s careful factual findings, which are subject to clear error review and have gone unchallenged by Alabama in any event. Pp. 11–15.
(b) The Court declines to remake its §2 jurisprudence in line with Alabama’s “race-neutral benchmark” theory.
(1) The Court rejects the State’s contention that adopting the race-neutral benchmark as the point of comparison in §2 cases would best match the text of the VRA. Section 2 requires political processes in a State to be “equally open” such that minority voters do not “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” §10301(b). Under the Court’s precedents, a district is not equally open 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. Alabama would ignore this precedent in favor of a rationale that a State’s map cannot “abridge[]” a person’s right to vote “on account of race” if the map resembles a sufficient number of race-neutral alternatives. But this Court’s cases have consistently focused, for purposes of litigation, on the specific illustrative maps that a plaintiff adduces. Deviation from that map shows it is possible that the State’s map has a disparate effect on account of race. The remainder of the Gingles test helps determine whether that possibility is reality by looking to polarized voting preferences and the frequency of racially discriminatory actions taken by the State.
