Page:Allen v. Milligan.pdf/22

Rh have gone unchallenged by Alabama in any event. See Cooper, 581 U. S., at 309. Nor is there a basis to upset the District Court’s legal conclusions. The Court faithfully applied our precedents and correctly determined that, under existing law, HB1 violated §2.

The heart of these cases is not about the law as it exists. It is about Alabama’s attempt to remake our §2 jurisprudence anew.

The centerpiece of the State’s effort is what it calls the “race-neutral benchmark.” The theory behind it is this: Using modern computer technology, mapmakers can now generate millions of possible districting maps for a given State. The maps can be designed to comply with traditional districting criteria but to not consider race. The mapmaker can determine how many majority-minority districts exist in each map, and can then calculate the median or average number of majority-minority districts in the entire multimillion-map set. That number is called the race-neutral benchmark.

The State contends that this benchmark should serve as the point of comparison in §2 cases. The benchmark, the State says, was derived from maps that were “race-blind”—maps that cannot have “deni[ed] or abridge[d]” anyone’s right to vote “on account of race” because they never took race into “account” in the first place. 52 U. S. C. §10301(a). Courts in §2 cases should therefore compare the number of majority-minority districts in the State’s plan to the benchmark. If those numbers are similar—if the State’s map “resembles” the benchmark in this way—then, Alabama argues, the State’s map also cannot have “deni[ed] or abridge[d]” anyone’s right to vote “on account of race.” Ibid.

Alabama contends that its approach should be adopted for two reasons. First, the State argues that a race-neutral benchmark best matches the text of the Voting Rights Act.