Cite as: 512 U. S. 874 (1994)
Opinion of Stevens, J.
and only colored citizens, of their theretofore enjoyed voting rights." Id., at 347.1
Because Gomillion was decided only a few years before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, and because coverage under the Voting Rights Act is generally coextensive with or broader than coverage under the Fifteenth Amendment, see Katzenbach v. Morgan, 384 U. S. 641 (1966); Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U. S. 55, 60-61 (1980) (plurality opinion), it is surely not unreasonable to infer that Congress intended the Act to reach the kind of voting practice that was at issue in that case. Nevertheless, the text of the Act would also have supported the opposite inference, because the language of the Fifteenth Amendment would seem to forbid any denial or abridgment of the right to vote, whereas §§ 2 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act refer only to "voting qualification[s,] . . . prerequisite[s] to voting, . . . standard[s], practice[s], [and] procedure[s]."
During the years between 1965 and 1969 the question whether the Voting Rights Act should be narrowly construed to cover nothing more than impediments to access to the ballot was an unresolved issue. What Justice Thomas describes as "a fundamental shift in the focal point of the Act," ante, at 895, occurred in 1969 when the Court unequivocally rejected the narrow reading, relying heavily on a broad
1 In most of his opinion, Justice Thomas seems to use the phrase "access to the ballot" to refer to the voter's ability to cast a vote. In an attempt to characterize the Gomillion gerrymander as a practice that interfered with access to the ballot, however, he seems to take the position that the redrawing of the boundaries of a governmental unit is a practice that affects access to the ballot because some voters' ballots could not thereafter be cast for the same offices as before. See ante, at 920, n. 20. Under such reasoning the substitution of an appointive office for an elective office, see Bunton v. Patterson, decided with Allen v. State Bd. of Elections, 393 U. S. 544, 550-551 (1969), or a change in district boundaries that prevented voters from casting ballots for the reelection of their incumbent congressional Representatives, would also be covered practices.
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