508
Souter, J., dissenting
But even if we assume the data on Democratic voting statewide can tell us something useful about Democratic voting in State Senate districts, the Court's argument does not hold up. It proceeds from the faulty premise that even with a low BVAP, if enough of the district is Democratic, the minority Democrats will necessarily have an effect on which candidates are elected. But if the proportion of nonminority Democrats is high enough, the minority group may well have no impact whatever on which Democratic candidate is selected to run and ultimately elected. In districts, say, with 20% minority voters (all of them Democrats) and 51% nonminority Democrats, the Democratic candidate has no obvious need to take the interests of the minority group into account; if everybody votes (or the proportion of stay-at-homes is constant throughout the electorate) the Democrat can win the general election without minority support. Even in a situation where a Democratic candidate needs a substantial fraction of minority voters to win (say the population is 25% minority and 30% nonminority Democrats), the Democratic candidate may still be able to ignore minority interests if there is such ideological polarization as between the major parties that the Republican candidate is entirely unresponsive to minority interests. In that situation, a minority bloc would presumably still prefer the Democrat, who would not need to adjust any political positions to get the minority vote.
All of this reasoning, of course, carries a whiff of the lamp. I do not know how Georgia's voters will actually behave if the percentage of something is x, or maybe y, any more than the Court does. We are arguing about numerical abstractions, and my sole point is that the Court's abstract arguments do not hold up. Much less do they prove the District Court wrong.
IV
Section 5, after all, was not enacted to address abstractions. It was enacted "to shift the advantage of time and
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