26
Syllabus
Held: 1. The District Court erred in not deferring to the state court's timely efforts to redraw the legislative and congressional districts. States have the primary duty and responsibility to perform that task, and federal courts must defer their action when a State, through its legislative or judicial branch, has begun in timely fashion to address the issue. Scott v. Germano, 381 U. S. 407. Absent evidence that these branches cannot timely perform their duty, a federal court cannot affirmatively obstruct, or permit federal litigation to impede, state reapportionment. Judged by these principles, the District Court erred in several respects: It set a deadline for reapportionment directed only to the state legislature, instead of to the legislature and courts; it issued an injunction that treated the state court's provisional legislative plan as "interfering" in the reapportionment process; it failed to give the state court's final order adopting a legislative plan legal effect under the principles of federalism and comity embodied in the full faith and credit statute; and it actively prevented the state court from issuing its own congressional plan, although it appears that the state court was prepared to do so. Pp. 32-37. 2. The District Court erred in its conclusion that the state court's legislative plan violated § 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The three prerequisites that were identified in Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S. 30, as necessary to establish a vote-dilution claim with respect to a multimember districting plan—a minority group that is sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district, minority political cohesion, and majority bloc voting that enables defeat of the minority's preferred candidate—are also necessary to establish a vote-fragmentation claim with respect to a single-member district. In the present case, even making the dubious assumption that the minority voters were geographically compact, the record contains no statistical or anecdotal evidence of majority bloc voting or minority political cohesion among the distinct ethnic and language minority groups the District Court combined in the new district. The Gingles preconditions were not only ignored but were on this record unattainable. Pp. 37-42.
782 F. Supp. 427, reversed and remanded.
Scalia, J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court.
John R. Tunheim, Chief Deputy Attorney General of Minnesota, argued the cause for appellants. With him on the briefs were Hubert H. Humphrey III, Attorney General, Jocelyn F. Olson, Assistant Attorney General,
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