100
Opinion of the Court
cluded maintaining core districts and communities of interest. Georgia has an unusually high number of counties: 159, the greatest number of any State in the Union apart from the much-larger Texas. These small counties represent communities of interest to a much greater degree than is common, and we agree with the District Court that "such a proliferation" provides "ample building blocks for acceptable voting districts without chopping any of those blocks in half." 864 F. Supp., at 1377.
In any case, even if we had found the court plan's population deviation unacceptable, the solution would not be adoption of the constitutionally infirm, because race-based, plans of appellants. Indeed, before this Court at oral argument private appellants acknowledged the remedy for any one-person, one-vote violation would not be creation of a second majority-black district. Tr. of Oral Arg. 28-29. Rather, we would require some very minor changes in the court's plan— a few shiftings of precincts—to even out districts with the greatest deviations.
That exercise, however, and appellant's objections to the court plan's slight population deviations, are increasingly futile. We are now more than six years from the last census, on which appellants' data is based. The difference between the court plan's average deviation (0.11%) and the Illustrative Plan's (0.07%) is 0.04%, which represents 328 people out of a perfect district population of 588,928. The population of Georgia has not stood still. Georgia is one of the fastest-growing States, and continues to undergo population shifts and changes. U. S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States 29 (1996) (Table 28) (showing Georgia tied for seventh place among the States in percentage of population growth from 1990 to 1995, with 11.2% growth). In light of these changes, the tinkerings appellants propose would not reflect Georgia's true population distribution in any event. The Karcher Court, in explaining the absolute equality standard, acknowledged that "census
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