910
Thomas, J., concurring in judgment
transferable votes 16—that can produce proportional results without requiring division of the electorate into racially segregated districts. Cf., e. g., Guinier 14-15, 94-101; Howard & Howard 1660; Karlan, Maps and Misreadings: The Role of Geographic Compactness in Racial Vote Dilution Litigation, 24 Harv. Civ. Rights-Civ. Lib. L. Rev. 173, 174-175, 231- 236 (1989) (hereinafter Karlan); Taebel, Engstrom, & Cole, Alternative Electoral Systems As Remedies for Minority Vote Dilution, 11 Hamline J. of Public Law & Policy 19 (1990); Note, Reconciling the Right to Vote with the Voting Rights Act, 92 Colum. L. Rev. 1810, 1857-1865 (1992).
Such changes may seem radical departures from the electoral systems with which we are most familiar. Indeed, they may be unwanted by the people in the several States who purposely have adopted districting systems in their electoral laws. But nothing in our present understanding of the Voting Rights Act places a principled limit on the authority of federal courts that would prevent them from instituting a system of cumulative voting as a remedy under § 2, or even from establishing a more elaborate mechanism for securing proportional representation based on transferable votes.17 As some Members of the Court have already recog-16 A system utilizing transferable votes is designed to ensure proportional representation with "mathematical exactness." Id., at 640. Under such a system, each voter rank orders his choices of candidates. To win, a candidate must receive a fixed quota of votes, which may be set by any of several methods. Ballots listing a given candidate as the voter's first choice are counted for that candidate until the candidate has secured the quota of votes necessary for election. Remaining first-choice ballots for that candidate are then transferred to another candidate, usually the one listed as the second choice on the ballot. See id., at 640-642. Like cumulative voting, the system allows a minority group to concentrate its voting power without requiring districting, and it has the additional advantage of ensuring that "surplus" votes are transferred to support the election of the minority voters' next preference.
17 Such methods of voting cannot be rejected out-of-hand as bizarre concoctions of Voting Rights Act plaintiffs. The system of transferable votes was a widely celebrated, although unsuccessful, proposal for English par-
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