934
Thomas, J., concurring in judgment
the author of that compromise, Senator Dole, hardly coincide with the gloss the Court has placed on § 2.
According to Senator Dole, amended § 2 would "[a]bsolutely not" provide any redress to a group of voters challenging electoral mechanisms in a jurisdiction "if the process is open, if there is equal access, if there are no barriers, direct or indirect, thrown up to keep someone from voting or having their vote counted, or registering, whatever the process may include." 128 Cong. Rec. 14133 (1982). Contrary to the Court's interpretation of the section in Gingles, Senator Dole viewed § 2 as a provision more narrowly focused on access to the processes surrounding the casting of a ballot, not a provision concerned with ensuring electoral outcomes in accordance with some "undiluted" norm. See S. Rep. No. 97-417, supra, at 193-194 (additional views of Sen. Dole). The legislative history thus hardly provided unambiguous support for the Court's interpretation; indeed, it seems that the Court used what was helpful to its interpretation in the legislative history and ignored what was not. Cf. Mortier, supra, at 617 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment).
Of course, as mentioned above, Gingles did not directly address the meaning of the terms "standard, practice, or procedure" in § 2(a). The understanding that those terms extend to a State's laws establishing various electoral mechanisms dates to our decision in Allen, in which we construed the identical terms in § 5 of the Act. But the Court's method of statutory construction in Allen was little different from that pursued in Gingles, and as the analysis of the text of § 5 above demonstrates, it similarly yielded an interpretation in tension with the terms of the Act.
In Allen, after noting that § 14(c)(1) defined "voting" to include "all action necessary to make a vote effective," 42 U. S. C. § 1973l(c)(1), the Court abandoned any further attempt to construe the text of the Act and went on, instead, to conclude that the "legislative history on the whole supports the view that Congress intended to reach any state
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