512 U.S. 997 (1994)

JOHNSON, SPEAKER OF THE FLORIDA HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, et al.
v.
DE GRANDY et al.

No. 92-519.

United States Supreme Court.

Argued October 4, 1993. Decided June 30, 1994.^[*] APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF FLORIDA

*999 *999 Souter, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Rehnquist, C. J., and Blackmun, Stevens, O'Connor, and Ginsburg, JJ., joined, and in all but Parts III—B-2, III—B-4, and IV of which Kennedy, J., joined. O'Connor, J., filed a concurring opinion, post, p. 1025. Kennedy, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment, post, p. 1026. Thomas, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Scalia, J., joined, post, p. 1031.

Joel I. Klein argued the cause for appellants in No. 92-519 and appellees in Nos. 92-593 and 92-767. With him on the brief for appellees in Nos. 92-593 and 92-767 were Stephen N. Zack, Keith E. Hope, Richard E. Doran, George L. Waas, and Gerald B. Curington. Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., Scott A. Sinder, Kevin X. Crowley, James A. Peters, and Messrs. Doran, Waas, and Curington filed briefs for appellants in No. 92-519.

James A. Feldman argued the cause for the United States in all cases. With him on the briefs were Solicitor General Days, Acting Solicitor General Bryson, Acting Assistant Attorney General Turner, Acting Deputy Solicitor General Kneedler, and Jessica Dunsay Silver.

C. Allen Foster argued the cause for appellees in No. 92— 519 and appellants in No. 92-593. With him on the briefs were Robert N. Hunter, Jr., Benjamin L. Ginsberg, Marshall R. Hurley, E. Thom Rumberger, and George N. Meros, Jr. E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr., John C. Keeney, Jr., Charles G. Burr, Dennis Courtland Hayes, and Willie Abrams filed a brief in all cases for appellee Florida State Conference of NAACP Branches.^[†]

*1000 Justice Souter, delivered the opinion of the Court.

These consolidated cases are about the meaning of vote dilution and the facts required to show it, when § 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is applied to challenges to singlemember legislative districts. See 79 Stat. 437, as amended, 42 U. S. C. § 1973. We hold that no violation of § 2 can be found here, where, in spite of continuing discrimination and racial bloc voting, minority voters form effective voting majorities in a number of districts roughly proportional to the minority voters' respective shares in the voting-age population. While such proportionality is not dispositive in a challenge to single-member districting, it is a relevant fact in the totality of circumstances to be analyzed when determining whether members of a minority group have "less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice." Ibid.

I

On the first day of Florida's 1992 legislative session, a group of Hispanic voters including Miguel De Grandy (De Grandy plaintiffs) complained in the United States District Court against the speaker of Florida's House of Representatives, the president of its Senate, the Governor, and other state officials (State). The complainants alleged that the districts from which Florida voters had chosen their state senators and representatives since 1982 were malapportioned, failing to reflect changes in the State's population during the ensuing decade. The State Conference of NAACP Branches and individual black voters (NAACP *1001 plaintiffs) filed a similar suit, which the three-judge District Court consolidated with the De Grandy case.^[1]

Several months after the first complaint was filed, on April 10, 1992, the state legislature adopted Senate Joint Resolution 2—G (SJR 2—G), providing the reapportionment plan currently at issue. The plan called for dividing Florida into 40 single-member Senate, and 120 single-member House, districts based on population data from the 1990 census. As the Constitution of Florida required, the state attorney general then petitioned the Supreme Court of Florida for a declaratory judgment that the legislature's apportionment plan was valid under federal and state law. See Fla. Const., Art. III, § 16(c). The court so declared, while acknowledging that state constitutional time constraints precluded full review for conformity with § 2 of the Voting Rights Act and recognizing the right of any interested party to bring a § 2 challenge to the plan in the Supreme Court of Florida. See In re Constitutionality of Senate Joint Resolution 2G, Special Apportionment Session 1992, 597 So. 2d 276, 285-286 (1992).^[2]

The De Grandy and NAACP plaintiffs responded to SJR 2—G by amending their federal complaints to charge the new *1002 reapportionment plan with violating § 2.^[3] They claimed that SJR 2—G "`unlawfully fragments cohesive minority communities and otherwise impermissibly submerges their right to vote and to participate in the electoral process,' " and they pointed to areas around the State where black or Hispanic populations could have formed a voting majority in a politically cohesive, reasonably compact district (or in more than one), if SJR 2—G had not fragmented each group among several districts or packed it into just a few. De Grandy v. Wetherell, 815 F. Supp. 1550, 1559-1560 (ND Fla. 1992).

The Department of Justice filed a similar complaint, naming the State of Florida and several elected officials as defendants and claiming that SJR 2—G diluted the voting strength of blacks and Hispanics in two parts of the State in violation of § 2. The Government alleged that SJR 2—G diluted the votes of the Hispanic population in an area largely covered by Dade County (including Miami) and the black population in an area covering much of Escambia County (including Pensacola).^[4] App. 75. The District Court consolidated this action with the other two and held a 5-day trial, followed immediately by an hours-long hearing on remedy.

At the end of the hearing, on July 1, 1992, the District 1, plan's provisions Court ruled from the bench. It held the for state House districts to be in violation of § 2 because "more than [SJR 2—G's] nine Hispanic districts may be drawn without having or creating a regressive effect upon black voters," and it imposed a remedial plan offered by the De Grandy plaintiffs calling for 11 majority-Hispanic House districts. *1003 App. to Juris. Statement 2a, 203a. As to the Senate, the court found that a fourth majority-Hispanic district could be drawn in addition to the three provided by SJR 2—G, but only at the expense of black voters in the area. Id., at 202a; 815 F. Supp., at 1560. The court was of two minds about the implication of this finding, once observing that it meant the legislature's plan for the Senate was a violation of § 2 but without a remedy, once saying the plan did not violate § 2 at all.^[5] In any event, it ordered elections to be held using SJR 2—G's senatorial districts.

In a later, expanded opinion the court reviewed the totality of circumstances as required by § 2 and Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S. 30 (1986). In explaining Dade County's "tripartite politics," in which "ethnic factors . . . predominate over all other[s] . . . ," 815 F. Supp., at 1572, the court found political cohesion within each of the Hispanic and black populations but none between the two, id., at 1569, and a tendency of non-Hispanic whites to vote as a bloc to bar minority groups from electing their chosen candidates except in a district *1004 where a given minority makes up a voting majority,^[6]id., at 1572. The court further found that the nearly one million Hispanics in the Dade County area could be combined into 4 Senate and 11 House districts, each one relatively compact and with a functional majority of Hispanic voters, id., at 1568-1569, whereas SJR 2—G created fewer majorityHispanic districts; and that one more Senate district with a black voting majority could have been drawn, id., at 1576. Noting that Florida's minorities bore the social,economic, and political effects of past discrimination, the court concluded that SJR 2—G impermissibly diluted the voting strength of Hispanics in its House districts and of both Hispanics and blacks in its Senate districts. Id., at 1574. The findings of vote dilution in the senatorial districts had no practical effect, however, because the court held that remedies for the blacks and the Hispanics were mutually exclusive; it consequently deferred to the state legislature's work as the "fairest" accommodation of all the ethnic communities in south Florida. Id., at 1580.

We stayed the judgment of the District Court, 505 U. S. 1232 (1992), and noted probable jurisdiction, 507 U. S. 907 (1993).

II

Before going to the issue at the heart of these cases, we need to consider the District Court's refusal to give preclusive effect to the decision of the State Supreme Court validating SJR 2—G. The State argues that the claims of the De Grandy plaintiffs should have been dismissed as res judicata because they had a full and fair opportunity to litigate vote dilution before the State Supreme Court, see In re Constitutionality of Senate Joint Resolution 2G, Special Apportionment Session 1992, 597 So. 2d, at 285. The premise, however, *1005 is false, exaggerating the review afforded the De Grandy plaintiffs in the state court and ignoring that court's own opinion of its judgment's limited scope. Given the state constitutional mandate to review apportionment resolutions within 30 days, see Fla. Const., Art. III, § 16(c), the Supreme Court of Florida accepted briefs and evidentiary submissions, but held no trial. In that court's own words, it was "impossible . . . to conduct the complete factual analysis contemplated by the Voting Rights Act . . . within the time constraints of article III," and its holding was accordingly "without prejudice to the right of any protestor to question the validity of the plan by filing a petition in this Court alleging how the plan violates the Voting Rights Act." 597 So. 2d, at 282, 285-286.

The State balks at recognizing this express reservation by blaming the De Grandy plaintiffs for not returning to the State Supreme Court with the § 2 claims. But the plaintiffs are free to litigate in any court with jurisdiction, and their choice to forgo further, optional state review hardly converted the state constitutional judgment into a decision following "full and fair opportunity to litigate," Allen v. McCurry, 449 U. S. 90, 104 (1980), as res judicata would require. For that matter, a federal court gives no greater preclusive effect to a state-court judgment than the state court itself would do, Marrese v. American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, 470 U. S. 373, 384-386 (1985), and the Supreme Court of Florida made it plain that its preliminary look at the vote dilution claims would have no preclusive effect under Florida law.

The State does not, of course, argue that res judicata bars the claims of the United States, which was not a party in the Florida Supreme Court action. It contends instead that the Federal Government's § 2 challenge deserved dismissal under this Court's Rooker /Feldman abstention doctrine, under which a party losing in state court is barred from seeking what in substance would be appellate review of the state *1006 judgment in a United States district court, based on the losing party's claim that the state judgment itself violates the loser's federal rights. See District of Columbia Court of Appeals v. Feldman, 460 U. S. 462, 482 (1983); Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co., 263 U. S. 413, 416 (1923). But the invocation of Rooker /Feldman is just as inapt here, for unlike Rooker or Feldman, the United States was not a party in the state court. It was in no position to ask this Court to review the state court's judgment and has not directly attacked it in this proceeding. Cf. Feldman, supra, at 468, and n. 2, 472, and n. 8 (suing District of Columbia Court of Appeals); Rooker, supra, at 414 (seeking to have state court's judgment declared null and void). The United States merely seeks to litigate its § 2 case for the first time, and the Government's claims, like those of the private plaintiffs, are properly before the federal courts.

III

On the merits of the vote dilution claims covering the House districts, the crux of the State's argument is the power of Hispanics under SJR 2—G to elect candidates of their choice in a number of districts that mirrors their share of the Dade County area's voting-age population (i. e., 9 out of 20 House districts); this power, according to the State, bars any finding that the plan dilutes Hispanic voting strength. The District Court is said to have missed that conclusion by mistaking our precedents to require the plan to maximize the number of Hispanic-controlled districts.

The State's argument takes us back to ground covered last Term in two cases challenging single-member districts. See Voinovich v. Quilter, 507 U. S. 146 (1993); Growe v. Emison, 507 U. S. 25 (1993). In Growe, we held that a claim of vote dilution in a single-member district requires proof meeting the same three threshold conditions for a dilution challenge to a multimember district: that a minority group be "`sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority *1007 in a single-member district' "; that it be "`politically cohesive' "; and that "`the white majority vot[e] sufficiently as a bloc to enable it . . . usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidate.' " Id., at 40 (quoting Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S., at 50-51). Of course, as we reflected in Voinovich and amplify later in this opinion, "the Gingles factors cannot be applied mechanically and without regard to the nature of the claim." 507 U. S., at 158.

In Voinovich we explained how manipulation of district lines can dilute the voting strength of politically cohesive minority group members, whether by fragmenting the minority voters among several districts where a bloc-voting majority can routinely outvote them, or by packing them into one or a small number of districts to minimize their influence in the districts next door. See id., at 153-154. Section 2 prohibits either sort of line-drawing where its result, "`interact[ing] with social and historical conditions,' impairs the ability of a protected class to elect its candidate of choice on an equal basis with other voters." Ibid. (quoting Gingles, supra, at 47).^[7]

Plaintiffs in Growe and Voinovich failed to show vote dilution because the former did not prove political cohesiveness of the minority group, Growe, supra, at 41-42, and the latter showed no significant white bloc voting, Voinovich, supra, at 158. Here, on the contrary, the District Court found, and the State does not challenge, the presence of both these Gingles preconditions. The dispute in this litigation centers on two quite different questions: whether Hispanics are sufficiently numerous and geographically compact to be a majority in additional single-member districts, as required by the first Gingles factor; and whether, even with all three Gingles *1008 conditions satisfied, the circumstances in totality support a finding of vote dilution when Hispanics can be expected to elect their chosen representatives in substantial proportion to their percentage of the area's population.

A

When applied to a claim that single-member districts dilute minority votes, the first Gingles condition requires the possibility of creating more than the existing number of reasonably compact districts with a sufficiently large minority population to elect candidates of its choice. The District Court found the condition satisfied by contrasting SJR 2—G with the De Grandy plan for the Dade County area, which provided for 11 reasonably compact districts, each with a voting-age population at least 64 percent Hispanic. 815 F. Supp., at 1580. While the percentage figures are not disputed, the parties disagree about the sufficiency of these supermajorities to allow Hispanics to elect representatives of their choice in all 11 districts. The District Court agreed with plaintiffs that the supermajorities would compensate for the number of voting-age Hispanics who did not vote, most commonly because they were recent immigrants who had not become citizens of the United States. Id., at 1567— 1568. The State protests that fully half of the Hispanic voting-age residents of the region are not citizens, with the result that several districts in the De Grandy plan lack enough Hispanic voters to elect candidates of their choice without cross-over votes from other ethnic groups. On these assumptions, the State argues that the condition necessary to justify tinkering with the State's plan disappears.

We can leave this dispute without a winner. The parties' ostensibly factual disagreement raises an issue of law about which characteristic of minority populations (e. g., age, citizenship) ought to be the touchstone for proving a dilution claim and devising a sound remedy. These cases may be resolved, however, without reaching this issue or the related *1009 question whether the first Gingles condition can be satisfied by proof that a so-called influence district may be created (that is, by proof that plaintiffs can devise an additional district in which members of a minority group are a minority of the voters, but a potentially influential one). As in the past, we will assume without deciding that even if Hispanics are not an absolute majority of the relevant population in the additional districts, the first Gingles condition has been satisfied in these cases. See Voinovich, supra, at 154; see also Growe, supra, at 41-42, n. 5 (declining to reach the issue); Gingles, supra, at 46-47, n. 12 (same).

B

We do, however, part company from the District Court in assessing the totality of circumstances. The District Court found that the three Gingles preconditions were satisfied, and that Hispanics had suffered historically from official discrimination, the social, economic, and political effects of which they generally continued to feel, 815 F. Supp., at 1573— 1574. Without more, and on the apparent assumption that what could have been done to create additional Hispanic supermajority districts should have been done, the District Court found a violation of § 2. But the assumption was erroneous, and more is required, as a review of Gingles will show.

1

Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S. 30 (1986), prompted this Court's first reading of § 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 after its 1982 amendment.^[8] Section 2(a) of the amended Act prohibits any "standard, practice, or procedure . . . 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 [or *1010 membership in a language minority group]. . . ." Section 2(b) provides that a denial or abridgment occurs where,

"based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a class of citizens protected by subsection (a) of this section in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice. The extent to which members of a protected class have been elected to office in the State or political subdivision is one circumstance which may be considered: Provided, That nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population." 42 U. S. C. § 1973(b).

Gingles provided some structure to the statute's "totality of circumstances" test in a case challenging multimember legislative districts. See 478 U. S., at 46-51. The Court listed the factors put forward as relevant in the Senate Report treating the 1982 amendments,^[9] and held that

*1011 "[w]hile many or all of [them] may be relevant to a claim of vote dilution through submergence in multimember districts, unless there is a conjunction of the following circumstances, the use of multimember districts generally will not impede the ability of minority voters to elect representatives of their choice. Stated succinctly, a bloc voting majority must usually be able to defeat candidates supported by a politically cohesive, geographically insular minority group." Id., at 48-49 (footnote omitted) (emphasis in original).

The Court thus summarized the three now-familiar Gingles factors (compactness/numerousness, minority cohesion or bloc voting, and majority bloc voting) as "necessary preconditions," id., at 50, for establishing vote dilution by use of a multimember district.

But if Gingles so clearly identified the three as generally necessary to prove a § 2 claim, it just as clearly declined to hold them sufficient in combination, either in the sense that a court's examination of relevant circumstances was complete once the three factors were found to exist, or in the sense that the three in combination necessarily and in all circumstances demonstrated dilution. This was true not only because bloc voting was a matter of degree, with a variable legal significance depending on other facts, id., at 55-58, but also because the ultimate conclusions about equality or inequality of opportunity were intended by Congress to be judgments resting on comprehensive, not limited, canvassing of relevant facts. Lack of electoral success is evidence of vote dilution, but courts must also examine other evidence in the totality of circumstances, including the extent of the opportunities minority voters enjoy to participate in the political *1012 processes. Id., at 46, 79-80; id., at 98-99 (O'Connor, J., concurring in judgment). To be sure, some § 2 plaintiffs may have easy cases, but although lack of equal electoral opportunity may be readily imagined and unsurprising when demonstrated under circumstances that include the three essential Gingles factors, that conclusion must still be addressed explicitly, and without isolating any other arguably relevant facts from the act of judgment.^[10]

2

If the three Gingles factors may not be isolated as sufficient, standing alone, to prove dilution in every multimember district challenge, a fortiori they must not be when the challenge goes to a series of single-member districts, where dilution may be more difficult to grasp. Plaintiffs challenging single-member districts may claim, not total submergence, but partial submergence; not the chance for some electoral *1013 success in place of none, but the chance for more success in place of some. When the question thus comes down to the reasonableness of drawing a series of district lines in one combination of places rather than another, judgments about inequality may become closer calls. As facts beyond the ambit of the three Gingles factors loom correspondingly larger, factfinders cannot rest uncritically on assumptions about the force of the Gingles factors in pointing to dilution.

The cases now before us, of course, fall on this more complex side of the divide, requiring a court to determine whether provision for somewhat fewer majority-minority districts than the number sought by the plaintiffs was dilution of the minority votes. The District Court was accordingly required to assess the probative significance of the Gingles factors critically after considering the further circumstances with arguable bearing on the issue of equal political opportunity. We think that in finding dilution here the District Court misjudged the relative importance of the Gingles factors and of historical discrimination, measured against evidence tending to show that in spite of these facts, SJR 2—G would provide minority voters with an equal measure of political and electoral opportunity.

The District Court did not, to be sure, commit the error of treating the three Gingles conditions as exhausting the enquiry required by § 2. Consistently with Gingles, the court received evidence of racial relations outside the immediate confines of voting behavior and found a history of discrimination against Hispanic voters continuing in society generally to the present day. But the District Court was not critical enough in asking whether a history of persistent discrimination reflected in the larger society and its bloc-voting behavior portended any dilutive effect from a newly proposed districting scheme, whose pertinent features were majorityminority districts in substantial proportion to the minority's share of voting-age population. The court failed to ask whether the totality of facts, including those pointing to *1014 proportionality,^[11] showed that the new scheme would deny minority voters equal political opportunity.

Treating equal political opportunity as the focus of the enquiry, we do not see how these district lines, apparently providing political effectiveness in proportion to voting-age numbers, deny equal political opportunity. The record establishes that Hispanics constitute 50 percent of the votingage population in Dade County and under SJR 2—G would make up supermajorities in 9 of the 18 House districts located primarily within the county. Likewise, if one considers the 20 House districts located at least in part within Dade County, the record indicates that Hispanics would be an effective voting majority in 45 percent of them (i. e., nine), and would constitute 47 percent of the voting-age population in the area. 815 F. Supp., at 1580; App. to Juris. Statement 180a—183a. In other words, under SJR 2—G Hispanics in the Dade County area would enjoy substantial proportionality. On this evidence, we think the State's scheme would thwart the historical tendency to exclude Hispanics, not encourage or perpetuate it. Thus in spite of that history and its legacy, including the racial cleavages that characterize Dade County politics today, we see no grounds for holding in these cases *1015 that SJR 2—G's district lines diluted the votes cast by Hispanic voters.

The De Grandy plaintiffs urge us to put more weight on the District Court's findings of packing and fragmentation, allegedly accomplished by the way the State drew certain specific lines: "[T]he line of District 116 separates heavily Hispanic neighborhoods in District 112 from the rest of the heavily Hispanic Kendall Lakes area and the Kendall area," so that the line divides "neighbors making up the . . . same housing development in Kendall Lakes," and District 114 "packs" Hispanic voters, while Districts 102 and 109 "fragmen[t]" them. 815 F. Supp., at 1569 (internal quotation marks omitted). We would agree that where a State has split (or lumped) minority neighborhoods that would have been grouped into a single district (or spread among several) if the State had employed the same line-drawing standards in minority neighborhoods as it used elsewhere in the jurisdiction, the inconsistent treatment might be significant evidence of a § 2 violation, even in the face of proportionality. The District Court, however, made no such finding. Indeed, the propositions the court recites on this point are not even phrased as factual findings, but merely as recitations of testimony offered by plaintiffs' expert witness. While the District Court may well have credited the testimony, the court was apparently wary of adopting the witness's conclusions as findings. But even if one imputed a greater significance to the accounts of testimony, they would boil down to findings that several of SJR 2—G's district lines separate portions of Hispanic neighborhoods, while another district line draws several Hispanic neighborhoods into a single district. This, however, would be to say only that lines could have been drawn elsewhere, nothing more. But some dividing by district lines and combining within them is virtually inevitable and befalls any population group of substantial size. Attaching the labels "packing" and "fragmenting" to these phenomena, *1016 without more, does not make the result vote dilution when the minority group enjoys substantial proportionality.

3

It may be that the significance of the facts under § 2 was obscured by the rule of thumb apparently adopted by the District Court, that anything short of the maximum number of majority-minority districts consistent with the Gingles conditions would violate § 2, at least where societal discrimination against the minority had occurred and continued to occur. But reading the first Gingles condition in effect to define dilution as a failure to maximize in the face of bloc voting (plus some other incidents of societal bias to be expected where bloc voting occurs) causes its own dangers, and they are not to be courted.

Assume a hypothetical jurisdiction of 1,000 voters divided into 10 districts of 100 each, where members of a minority group make up 40 percent of the voting population and voting is totally polarized along racial lines. With the right geographic dispersion to satisfy the compactness requirement, and with careful manipulation of district lines, the minority voters might be placed in control of as many as 7 of the 10 districts. Each such district could be drawn with at least 51 members of the minority group, and whether the remaining minority voters were added to the groupings of 51 for safety or scattered in the other three districts, minority voters would be able to elect candidates of their choice in all seven districts.^[12] The point of the hypothetical is not, of course, that any given district is likely to be open to such extreme manipulation, or that bare majorities are likely to vote in full force and strictly along racial lines, but that reading § 2 to define dilution as any failure to maximize tends to *1017 obscure the very object of the statute and to run counter to its textually stated purpose. One may suspect vote dilution from political famine, but one is not entitled to suspect (much less infer) dilution from mere failure to guarantee a political feast. However prejudiced a society might be, it would be absurd to suggest that the failure of a districting scheme to provide a minority group with effective political power 75 percent above its numerical strength^[13] indicates a denial of equal participation in the political process. Failure to maximize cannot be the measure of § 2.

4

While, for obvious reasons, the State agrees that a failure to leverage minority political strength to the maximum possible point of power is not definitive of dilution in bloc-voting societies, it seeks to impart a measure of determinacy by applying a definitive rule of its own: that as a matter of law no dilution occurs whenever the percentage of singlemember districts in which minority voters form an effective majority mirrors the minority voters' percentage of the relevant population.^[14] Proportionality so defined, see n. 11, *1018 supra, would thus be a safe harbor for any districting scheme.

The safety would be in derogation of the statutory text and its considered purpose, however, and of the ideal that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 attempts to foster. An inflexible rule would run counter to the textual command of § 2, that the presence or absence of a violation be assessed "based on the totality of circumstances." 42 U. S. C. § 1973(b). The need for such "totality" review springs from the demonstrated ingenuity of state and local governments in hobbling minority voting power, McCain v. Lybrand, 465 U. S. 236, 243-246 (1984), a point recognized by Congress when it amended the statute in 1982: "[S]ince the adoption of the Voting Rights Act, [some] jurisdictions have substantially moved from direct, over[t] impediments to the right to vote to more sophisticated devices that dilute minority voting strength," Senate Report 10 (discussing § 5). In modifying § 2, Congress thus endorsed our view in White v. Regester, 412 U. S. 755 (1973), that "whether the political processes are `equally open' depends upon a searching practical evaluation of the `past and present reality,' " Senate Report 30 (quoting 412 U. S., at 766, 770). In a substantial number of voting jurisdictions, that past reality has included such reprehensible practices as ballot box stuffing, outright violence, discretionary registration, property requirements, the poll tax, and the white primary; and other practices censurable when the object of their use is discriminatory, such as at-large elections, runoff requirements, anti-single-shot devices, gerrymandering, the impeachment of officeholders, the annexation or deannexation of territory, and the creation or elimination of elective offices.^[15] Some of those expedients *1019 could occur even in a jurisdiction with numerically demonstrable proportionality; the harbor safe for States would thus not be safe for voters.^[16] It is, in short, for good reason that we have been, and remain, chary of entertaining a simplification of the sort the State now urges upon us. Cf. Gingles, 478 U. S., at 77 ("[P]ersistent proportional representation . . . [may] not accurately reflect the minority group's ability to elect its preferred representatives").

Even if the State's safe harbor were open only in cases of alleged dilution by the manipulation of district lines, however, it would rest on an unexplored premise of highly suspect validity: that in any given voting jurisdiction (or portion of that jurisdiction under consideration), the rights of some minority voters under § 2 may be traded off against the rights of other members of the same minority class. Under the State's view, the most blatant racial gerrymandering in half of a county's single-member districts would be irrelevant under § 2 if offset by political gerrymandering in the other half, so long as proportionality was the bottom line. But see Baird v. Consolidated City of Indianapolis, 976 F. 2d 357, 359 (CA7 1992) ("A balanced bottom line does not foreclose proof of discrimination along the way"); Richmond v. United States, 422 U. S. 358, 378-379 (1975) (territorial annexation aimed at diluting black votes forbidden by § 5, regardless of its actual effect).

Finally, we reject the safe harbor rule because of a tendency the State would itself certainly condemn, a tendency to promote and perpetuate efforts to devise majority-minority districts even in circumstances where they may not be necessary *1020 to achieve equal political and electoral opportunity. Because in its simplest form the State's rule would shield from § 2 challenge a districting scheme in which the number of majority-minority districts reflected the minority's share of the relevant population, the conclusiveness of the rule might be an irresistible inducement to create such districts. It bears recalling, however, that for all the virtues of majority-minority districts as remedial devices, they rely on a quintessentially race-conscious calculus aptly described as the "politi