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28 In reality, the limits of the Gingles preconditions and the aimlessness of the totality-of-circumstances inquiry left the District Court only one obvious and readily administrable option: a benchmark of “allocation of seats in direct proportion to the minority group’s percentage in the population.” Holder, 512 U. S., at 937 (opinion of ). True, as disusseddiscussed [sic] above, that benchmark is impossible to square with what the majority calls §2(b)’s “robust disclaimer against proportionality,”, and it runs headlong into grave constitutional problems. See Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, 551 U. S. 701, 730 (2007) (plurality opinion). Nonetheless, the intuitive pull of proportionality is undeniable. “Once one accepts the proposition that the effectiveness of votes is measured in terms of the control of seats, the core of any vote dilution claim” “is inherently based on ratios between the numbers of the minority in the population and the numbers of seats controlled,” and there is no more logical ratio than direct proportionality. Holder, 512 U. S., at 902 (opinion of ). Combine that intuitive appeal with the “lack of any better alternative” identified in our case law to date, id., at 937, and we should not be surprised to learn that proportionality generally explains the results of §2 cases after the Gingles preconditions are satisfied. See E. Katz, M. Aisenbrey, A. Baldwin, E. Cheuse, & A. Weisbrodt, Documenting Discrimination in Voting: Judicial Findings Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act Since 1982, 39 U. Mich. J. L. Reform 643, 730–732 (2006) (surveying lower court cases and finding a near-perfect correlation between proportionality findings and liability results).

Thus, in the absence of an alternative benchmark, the vote-dilution inquiry has a strong and demonstrated tendency to collapse into a rough two-part test: (1) Does the challenged districting plan give the relevant minority group control of a proportional share of seats? (2) If not, has the plaintiff shown that some reasonably configured districting