Cite as: 517 U. S. 899 (1996)
Stevens, J., dissenting
tricts here, the State would seem to have precluded potential litigants from satisfying that precondition.21
In addition, satisfaction of the so-called Gingles preconditions does not entitle an individual minority voter to inclusion in a majority-minority district. A court may conclude that a State must create such a district only after it considers the totality of the circumstances. A court would be remiss if it failed to take into account that the State had drawn majority-minority districts proportional to its minority population which include portions of the very minority community in which an individual minority plaintiff resides. Indeed, our recent decisions compel courts to perform just such a calculus. See Johnson v. De Grandy, 512 U. S., at 1012- 1016; Voinovich v. Quilter, 507 U. S. 146 (1993); see also African American Voting Rights Legal Defense Fund, Inc. v. Villa, 54 F. 3d 1345, 1355-1357 (CA8 1995).
21 The majority's assertion that De Grandy only requires a plaintiff to show that more "reasonably compact" majority-minority districts could have been drawn would seem to expand dramatically a State's potential liability under § 2. Ante, at 916, n. 8. I would have thought that a State that had drawn three majority-minority districts, one of which was "reasonably compact" and two of which straggled in order to preserve certain distinctive communities of interest, would at the very least be immune to a challenge by a single African-American plaintiff bearing a map proposing to draw but two compact majority-minority districts. The Court's expansive notion of § 2 liability, combined with its apparent eagerness to subject all legislative attempts to comply with that Act to strict scrutiny, will place many States in the untenable position of facing substantial litigation no matter how they draw their maps. See Miller v. Johnson, 515 U. S., at 949 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).
Of course, a State that unfairly "packs" African-American voters into a
limited number of districts may be subject to a § 2 challenge on the ground that it failed to create so-called "influence" districts, and perhaps the majority means to endorse that proposition as well. I note here, however, that there is no indication that such a challenge could be successfully brought against North Carolina's two majority-minority district plan, which creates districts with only bare African-American majorities.
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