Cite as: 517 U. S. 952 (1996)
Stevens, J., dissenting
legitimate process—choosing minority voters for inclusion in a majority-minority district—should become suspect once nonracial considerations force district lines away from its core.
Finally, I note that in most contexts racial classifications are invidious because they are irrational. For example, it is irrational to assume that a person is not qualified to vote or to serve as a juror simply because she has brown hair or brown skin. It is neither irrational, nor invidious, however, to assume that a black resident of a particular community is a Democrat if reliable statistical evidence discloses that 97% of the blacks in that community vote in Democratic primary elections. See Brief for United States 44. For that reason, the fact that the architects of the Texas plan sometimes appear to have used racial data as a proxy for making political judgments seems to me to be no more "unjustified," ante, at 969 (opinion of O'Connor, J.), and to have no more constitutional significance, than an assumption that wealthy suburbanites, whether black or white, are more likely to be Repub-argues that the State's effort to "compil[e] detailed racial data," ante, at 967, is evidence of the controlling role of race in the computer-dominated process of redistricting. See ante, at 961-962; 861 F. Supp., at 1318-1319. It is worth noting, however, that the State made no particular "effort" to gather these data; it was included, along with similarly detailed information about sex, age, and income levels, in the data set provided by the Census Bureau and imported wholesale into the State's redistricting computers. Cf. Shaw, 861 F. Supp., at 457. Furthermore, even if the computer was used to fine tune the district lines to ensure that minority communities were included in District 30 (rather than individualized requests from candidates and their staffers on the basis of block-level data, see supra, at 1017-1018), such a technique amounts to little more than the use of a particularly efficient and accurate means of ensuring that the intended nature of the district was not undermined as incumbency protection forced it out of a compact district. I do not suggest that the end can always justify the means, but if those means are no more invidious than the end itself, I do not understand why their use should affect the analysis. I would not condemn state legislation merely because it was based on accurate information.
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