112
Breyer, J., dissenting
ever held that rural and urban racial minorities cannot together create a compact minority for § 2 compactness purposes. Moreover, it seems clear that rural and urban African-American voters who live near each other might share important common interests; and I have found nothing in the record that suggests that the rural and urban black voters here, living near each other, do not share many common interests—in respect to many important legislative matters. See Karlan & Levinson, Why Voting Is Different, 84 Calif. L. Rev. 1201, 1216-1220 (1996); see also Gingles, supra, at 64 (citing Butler, Constitutional and Statutory Challenges to Election Structures: Dilution and the Value of the Right to Vote, 42 La. L. Rev. 851, 902 (1982), and S. Verba & N. Nie, Participation in America 151-152 (1972)).
The District Court considered the remaining two Gingles
factors (the minority's "political cohesiveness" and the majority's "bloc voting") under a single rubric, which the majority calls "the extent of racially polarized voting." Ante, at 92. Of course, Georgia's history, including the political results that I have mentioned before—the fact that African-American representatives have come almost exclusively from majority-minority districts—strongly support the existence of that "polarization." Moreover, appellants produced experts who testified that the percentage of District 11 white voters willing to vote for a black candidate varied from 0 to 26 percent, while the number of black voters willing to vote for a white candidate varied from 3 to 11 percent. App. 54-61, 69-70, 72. Other expert testimony suggested less polarization (placing the relevant numbers at 22 to 38 percent white-for-black and 20 percent to 23 percent black-for-white). Johnson v. Miller, 864 F. Supp., at 1390. But that other testimony rested in considerable part on local (and judicial, and primary) election results with multiple candidates or other special features that discouraged racial bloc voting, and for that reason they may have overstated
Page: Index Previous 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007