Thomas, J., dissenting
Voting Rights Act, States and localities deprived black Americans of the ballot: “poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications, white primaries, and grandfather clauses” (alterations and internal quotation marks omitted)).[1]
Moreover, the majority drastically overstates the stare decisis support for applying §2 to single-member districting plans like the one at issue here.[2] As the majority implicitly acknowledges, this Court has only applied §2 to invalidate one single-member district in one case. See League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, 548 U. S. 399, 447 (2006) (LULAC) (opinion of Kennedy, J.). And no party in that case argued that the plaintiffs’ vote-dilution claim was not cognizable. As for Growe v. Emison, 507 U. S. 25 (1993), it held only that the threshold preconditions for challenging
- ↑ The majority suggests that districting lines are a “ ‘prerequisite to voting’ ” because they “determin[e] where” voters “cast [their] ballot[s].” Ante, at 32. But, of course, a voter’s polling place is a separate matter from the district to which he is assigned, and communities are often moved between districts without changing where their residents go to vote. The majority’s other example (“who [voters] are eligible to vote for,” ibid.) is so far a stretch from the Act’s focus on voting qualifications and voter action that it speaks for itself.
- ↑ The majority chides Alabama for declining to specifically argue that §2 is inapplicable to multimember and at-large districting plans. But these cases are about a single-member districting plan, and it is hardly uncommon for parties to limit their arguments to the question presented. Further, while I do not myself believe that the text of §2 applies to multimember or at-large plans, the idea that such plans might be especially problematic from a vote-dilution standpoint is hardly foreign to the Court’s precedents, see Johnson v. De Grandy, 512 U. S. 997, 1012 (1994); Growe v. Emison, 507 U. S. 25, 40 (1993); cf. Holder v. Hall, 512 U. S. 874, 888 (1994) (O’Connor, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment) (explaining that single-member districts may provide the benchmark when multimember or at-large systems are challenged, but suggesting no benchmark for challenges to single-member districts), or to the historical evolution of vote-dilution claims. Neither the case from which the 1982 Congress drew §2(b)’s current operative language, see White v. Regester, 412 U. S. 755, 766 (1973), nor the one it was responding to, Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U. S. 55 (1980), involved single-member districts.
