940
Thomas, J., concurring in judgment
serves to obscure the inherent conflict between the text of
the Act and an underlying reliance on proportionality.
The resort to proportionality in our cases should hardly come as a surprise. Before § 2 was amended in 1982, and thus before the Act explicitly disavowed a right to proportional representation, some Members of the Court recognized the inevitable drift toward proportional representation that would occur if the test outlined in White were used to evaluate vote dilution claims. As Justice Stewart, writing for four Members of the Court, observed, the factors listed in White amounted to little more than "gauzy sociological considerations," and it did not appear that "they could, in any principled manner, exclude the claims of any discrete political group that happens, for whatever reason, to elect fewer of its candidates than arithmetic indicates it might." Bolden, 446 U. S., at 75, n. 22 (emphasis added). Indeed, Justice Stewart was correct in concluding that "the putative limits [imposed by the White factors] are bound to prove illusory if the express purpose informing their application would be," as our vote dilution cases have assumed, "to redress the inequitable distribution of political influence." Ibid. (internal quotation marks omitted).
In fact, the framework established by this Court for evaluating vote dilution claims in Gingles was at its inception frankly, and in my view correctly, labeled as setting a rule of roughly proportional representation. See Gingles, supra, at 91, 93, 97-99 (O'Connor, J., concurring in judgment). Nothing has happened in the intervening years to change the basic import of the Gingles test. Yet we have continued to apply the same Gingles framework, see, e. g., Growe v. Emison, 507 U. S. 25 (1993), all the while suggesting that we are pursuing merely a "totality of the circumstances" test.
In another case decided today, the Court reconfirms the unstated centrality of proportional results in an opinion that demonstrates the obfuscation that must come to characterize our Voting Rights Act rulings if we continue to entertain
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