908
Thomas, J., concurring in judgment
racy by signaling to elected officials that they represent a particular racial group rather than their constituency as a whole").
Perhaps not surprisingly, the United States has now adopted precisely this theory of racial group representation, as the arguments advanced in another case decided today, Johnson v. De Grandy, post, p. 997, should show. The case involved a claim that an apportionment plan for the Florida Legislature should have provided another Hispanic district in Dade County. Florida responded to the claim of vote dilution by arguing that the plan already provided Dade County Hispanics with seats in proportion to their numbers. According to the Solicitor General, this claim of proportionality should have been evaluated, not merely on the basis of the population in the Dade County area where the racial gerrymandering was alleged to have occurred, but on a statewide basis. It did not matter, in the Solicitor General's view, that Hispanic populations elsewhere in the State could not meet the Gingles geographic compactness test, see 478 U. S., at 50, and thus could not possibly have controlled districts of their own. After all, the Solicitor General reasoned, the Hispanic legislators elected from Hispanic districts in Dade County would represent, not just the interests of the Dade County Hispanics, but the interests of all the Hispanics in the State. Brief for United States in Johnson v. De Grandy, O. T. 1993, No. 92-519, p. 20. As the argument shows, at least some careful observers have recognized the racial gerrymandering in our vote dilution cases for what it is: a slightly less precise mechanism than the racial register for allocating representation on the basis of race.
C
While the results we have already achieved under the Voting Rights Act might seem bad enough, we should recognize that our approach to splintering the electorate into racially designated single-member districts does not by any means
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