334
Opinion of the Court
core meaning is "shorten," see Webster's New International Dictionary 7 (2d ed. 1950); American Heritage Dictionary 6 (3d ed. 1992)—necessarily entails a comparison. It makes no sense to suggest that a voting practice "abridges" the right to vote without some baseline with which to compare the practice. In § 5 preclearance proceedings—which uniquely deal only and specifically with changes in voting procedures—the baseline is the status quo that is proposed to be changed: If the change "abridges the right to vote" relative to the status quo, preclearance is denied, and the status quo (however discriminatory it may be) remains in effect. In § 2 or Fifteenth Amendment proceedings, by contrast, which involve not only changes but (much more commonly) the status quo itself, the comparison must be made with a hypothetical alternative: If the status quo "results in [an] abridgement of the right to vote" or "abridge[s] [the right to vote]" relative to what the right to vote ought to be, the status quo itself must be changed. Our reading of "abridging" as referring only to retrogression in § 5, but to discrimination more generally in § 2 and the Fifteenth Amendment, is faithful to the differing contexts in which the term is used.3
in a "subsequent action." Ibid. We of course intimate no holding on this point, but limit our conclusion to the nonprobative character of § 3(c) with regard to the issue in the present cases.
3 Even if § 5 did not have a different baseline than the Fifteenth Amendment, appellants' argument that § 5 should be read in parallel with the Fifteenth Amendment would fail for the simple reason that we have never held that vote dilution violates the Fifteenth Amendment. See Voinovich v. Quilter, 507 U. S. 146, 159 (1993) (citing Beer v. United States, 425 U. S. 130, 142-143, n. 14 (1976)). Indeed, contrary to Justice Souter's assertion, post, at 360, n. 11 (opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part), we have never even "suggested" as much. Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U. S. 339 (1960), involved a proposal to redraw the boundaries of Tuskegee, Alabama, so as to exclude all but 4 or 5 of its 400 black voters without excluding a single white voter. See id., at 341. Our conclusion that the proposal would deny black voters the right to vote in municipal elections, and therefore violated the Fifteenth Amendment, had nothing to do with racial vote dilution, a concept that does not appear in
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