880
Opinion of Kennedy, J.
We granted certiorari to review the statutory holding of the Court of Appeals. 507 U. S. 959 (1993).
II
A
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 provides that "[n]o voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner 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." 42 U. S. C. § 1973(a). In a § 2 vote dilution suit, along with determining whether the Gingles preconditions are met 1 and whether the totality of the circumstances supports a finding of liability, a court must find a reasonable alternative practice as a benchmark against which to measure the existing voting practice. See post, at 887 (O'Connor, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). As Justice O'Connor explained in Gingles: "The phrase vote dilution itself suggests a norm with respect to which the fact of dilution may be ascertained . . . . [I]n order to decide whether an electoral system has made it harder for minority voters to elect the candidates they prefer, a court must have an idea in mind of how hard it should be for minority voters to elect their preferred candidates under an acceptable system." 478 U. S., at 88 (opinion concurring in judgment) (internal quotation marks omitted).
In certain cases, the benchmark for comparison in a § 2 dilution suit is obvious. The effect of an anti-single-shot voting rule, for instance, can be evaluated by comparing the
1 Gingles requires a showing that "the minority group . . . is sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district," 478 U. S., at 50, that the minority group is politically cohesive, and that the majority group "votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it—in the absence of special circumstances . . . usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidate," id., at 51.
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