936
Stevens, J., dissenting
wardly accomplished by simply adopting the Attorney General's recommendation to draw a geographically compact district in the southeastern portion of the State in addition to the majority-minority district that had already been drawn in the northeastern and Piedmont regions. See Shaw I, 509 U. S., at 634-635; 861 F. Supp., at 460, 461-462, 464. That the legislature chose to draw Districts 1 and 12 instead surely suggests that something more than the desire to create a majority-minority district took precedence. For that reason, this case would seem to present a version of the very hypothetical that the principal opinion in Bush suggests should pose no constitutional problem—"an otherwise compact majority-minority district that is misshapen by predominantly nonracial, political manipulation." Bush, post, at 981.
Here, no evidence suggests that race played any role in the legislature's decision to choose the winding contours of District 12 over the more cartographically pleasant boundaries proposed by the Attorney General.13 Rather, the rec-13 The State's decision to give little weight to how the district would look on a map is entirely justifiable. Although a voter clearly has an interest in being in a district whose members share similar interests and concerns, that interest need not, and often is not, vindicated by drawing districts with attractive shapes. "[The Districts'] perceived 'ugliness'— their extreme irregularity of shape—is entirely a function of an artificial perspective unrelated to the common goings and comings of the citizen-voter. From the mapmaker's wholly imaginary vertical perspective at 1:25,000 or so range, a citizen may well find his district's one-dimensional, featureless shape aesthetically 'bizarre,' 'grotesque,' or 'ugly.' But back down at ground or eye-level, viewing things from his normal closely-bound horizontal perspective, the irregularity of outline or exact volume of the district in which he resides surely is not a matter of any great practical consequence to his conduct as a citizen-voter." 861 F. Supp. 408, 472, n. 60 (EDNC 1994).
In the same vein, I doubt that residents of hook-shaped Massachusetts receive less effective representation than their counterparts in perfectly rectangular Wyoming, or that the voting power of residents of Hawaii
Page: Index Previous 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007