Cite as: 512 U. S. 997 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
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 necesmittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the House Committee on the Judiciary, 97th Cong., 1st Sess., 1999-2022, 2115-2120 (1981).
16 The State might say, of course, that ostensibly "proportional" districting schemes that were nonetheless subject to diluting practices would not "assur[e]" minority voters their apparent voting power. But this answer would take us right back to a searching review of the factual totality, leaving the State's defensive rule without any particular utility.
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