Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-11-05256/USCOURTS-caDC-11-05256-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 890
Nature of Suit: Other Statutory Actions
Cause of Action: 

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United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued January 19, 2012 Decided May 18, 2012

No. 11-5256

SHELBY COUNTY, ALABAMA,

APPELLANT

v.

ERIC H. HOLDER, JR., IN HIS OFFICIAL CAPACITY AS ATTORNEY 

GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES, ET AL.,

APPELLEES

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the District of Columbia

(No. 1:10-cv-00651)

Bert W. Rein argued the cause for appellant. With him on 

the briefs were William S. Consovoy, Thomas R. McCarthy, 

and Brendan J. Morrissey.

John C. Neiman Jr., Solicitor General, Office of the 

Attorney General for the State of Alabama, and Robert D. 

Tambling, Assistant Attorney General, were on the brief for 

amicus curiae State of Alabama in support of appellant.

Thomas C. Horne, Attorney General, Office of the 

Attorney General for the State of Arizona, David R. Cole, 

Solicitor General, Michele L. Forney and James E. Barton II, 

Assistant Attorneys General, and Samuel S. Olens, Attorney 

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General, Office of the Attorney General of the State of 

Georgia, were on the brief for amici curiae States of Arizona 

and Georgia.

Steven J. Lechner was on the brief as amicus curiae 

Mountain States Legal Foundation in support of appellant.

Sarah E. Harrington, Attorney, U.S. Department of 

Justice, argued the cause for appellee. With her on the brief 

were Ronald C. Machen Jr., U.S. Attorney, and Diana K. 

Flynn and Linda F. Thome, Attorneys.

Eric T. Schneiderman, Attorney General, Office of the 

Attorney General for the State of New York, Barbara D. 

Underwood, Solicitor General. Jim Hood, Attorney General, 

Office of the Attorney General for the State of Mississippi, 

and Kamala D. Harris, Attorney General, Office of the 

Attorney General for the State of California, were on the brief 

for amici curiae New York, et al., in support of appellees. 

John Payton, Debo P. Adegbile, Elise C. Boddie, Ryan P. 

Haygood, Dale E. Ho, Natasha M. Korgaonkar, Arthur B. 

Spitzer, Jon M. Greenbaum, and John M. Nonna were on the 

brief for intervenors-appellees Earl Cunningham, et al., in 

support of appellees. 

Deborah N. Archer and Aderson B. Francois were on the 

brief for amicus curiae The New York Law School Racial 

Justice Project in support of appellee. 

Elizabeth B. Wydra was on the brief for amicus curiae 

Constitutional Accountability Center in support of appellees. 

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Before: TATEL and GRIFFITH, Circuit Judges, and 

WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge.

Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge TATEL.

Dissenting opinion filed by Senior Circuit Judge

WILLIAMS.

TATEL, Circuit Judge: In Northwest Austin Municipal 

Utility District No. One v. Holder, 129 S. Ct. 2504 (2009), the 

Supreme Court raised serious questions about the continued 

constitutionality of section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 

1965. Section 5 prohibits certain “covered jurisdictions” from 

making any change in their voting procedures without first 

demonstrating to either the Attorney General or a three-judge 

district court in Washington that the change “neither has the 

purpose nor will have the effect of denying or abridging the 

right to vote on account of race or color.” 42 U.S.C. 

§ 1973c(a). The Supreme Court warned that the burdens 

imposed by section 5 may no longer be justified by current 

needs and that its geographic coverage may no longer 

sufficiently relate to the problem it targets. Although the 

Court had no occasion to resolve these questions, they are 

now squarely before us. Shelby County, Alabama, a covered 

jurisdiction, contends that when Congress reauthorized 

section 5 in 2006, it exceeded its enumerated powers. The 

district court disagreed and granted summary judgment for

the Attorney General. For the reasons set forth in this opinion, 

we affirm.

I.

The Framers of our Constitution sought to construct a 

federal government powerful enough to function effectively

yet limited enough to preserve the hard-earned liberty fought 

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for in the War of Independence. They feared not state 

government, but centralized national government, long the 

hallmark of Old World monarchies. As a result, “[t]he powers 

delegated by the . . . Constitution to the federal government,

are few and defined,” while “[t]hose which are to remain in 

the State governments are numerous and indefinite.” The 

Federalist No. 45 (James Madison). Close to the people, state 

governments would protect their liberties.

But the experience of the nascent Republic, divided by 

slavery, taught that states too could threaten individual 

liberty. So after the Civil War, the Reconstruction 

Amendments were added to the Constitution to limit state 

power. Adopted in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment 

prohibited involuntary servitude. Adopted three years later, 

the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited any state from 

“depriv[ing] any person of life, liberty, or property, without 

due process of law” or “deny[ing] to any person within its 

jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” and granted 

Congress “power to enforce” its provisions “by appropriate 

legislation.” U.S. Const. amend. XIV. Finally, the Fifteenth 

Amendment declared that “[t]he right of citizens . . . to vote 

shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any 

State on account of race, color, or previous condition of 

servitude” and vested Congress with “power to enforce this 

article by appropriate legislation.” U.S. Const. amend. XV.

Following Reconstruction, however, “the blight of racial 

discrimination in voting . . . infected the electoral process in 

parts of our country for nearly a century.” South Carolina v. 

Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 308 (1966). As early as 1890, “the 

States of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North 

Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia” began employing 

tests and devices “specifically designed to prevent Negroes 

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from voting.” Id. at 310. Among the most notorious devices 

were poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and 

property qualifications. See Shelby Cnty. v. Holder, 811 F. 

Supp. 2d 424, 428 (D.D.C. 2011); see also Katzenbach, 383 

U.S. at 310–11. Also widely employed, both immediately 

following Reconstruction and again in the mid-twentieth 

century, were “laws designed to dilute black voting strength,”

including laws that “gerrymandered election districts, 

instituted at-large elections, annexed or deannexed 

land . . . and required huge bonds of officeholders.” Shelby 

Cnty., 811 F. Supp. 2d at 429 (internal quotation marks 

omitted).

The courts and Congress eventually responded. The 

Supreme Court struck down grandfather clauses, Guinn v. 

United States, 238 U.S. 347 (1915), and white primaries, 

Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944). Congress “enact[ed] 

civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, and 1964, which sought 

to ‘facilitat[e] case-by-case litigation against voting 

discrimination.’ ” Shelby Cnty., 811 F. Supp. 2d at 430

(alteration in original) (quoting Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 313). 

But Congress soon determined that such measures were 

inadequate: case-by-case litigation, in addition to being 

expensive, was slow—slow to come to a result and slow to 

respond once a state switched from one discriminatory device

to the next—and thus had “done little to cure the problem of 

voting discrimination.” Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 313. 

Determined to “rid the country of racial discrimination in 

voting,” id. at 315, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 

1965. 

Unlike prior legislation, the 1965 Act combined a 

permanent, case-by-case enforcement mechanism with a set 

of more stringent, temporary remedies designed to target 

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those areas of the country where racial discrimination in 

voting was concentrated. Section 2, the Act’s main permanent 

provision, forbids any “standard, practice, or procedure” that 

“results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of 

the United States to vote on account of race or color.” 42 

U.S.C. § 1973(a). Applicable nationwide, section 2 enables 

individuals to bring suit against any state or jurisdiction to 

challenge voting practices that have a discriminatory purpose 

or result. See Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30, 35 (1986). 

Reaching beyond case-by-case litigation and applying 

only in certain “covered jurisdictions,” section 5—the focus 

of this litigation—“prescribes remedies . . . which go into 

effect without any need for prior adjudication.” Katzenbach, 

383 U.S. at 327–28. Section 5 suspends “all changes in state 

election procedure until they [are] submitted to and approved 

by a three-judge Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., 

or the Attorney General.” Nw. Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 2509. A 

jurisdiction seeking to change its voting laws or procedures 

must either submit the change to the Attorney General or seek 

preclearance directly from the three-judge court. If it opts for 

the former and if the Attorney General lodges no objection 

within sixty days, the proposed law can take effect. 42 U.S.C. 

§ 1973c(a). But if the Attorney General lodges an objection, 

the submitting jurisdiction may either request reconsideration, 

28 C.F.R. § 51.45(a), or seek a de novo determination from 

the three-judge district court. 42 U.S.C. § 1973c(a). Either 

way, preclearance may be granted only if the jurisdiction 

demonstrates that the proposed change to its voting law 

neither “has the purpose nor . . . the effect of denying or 

abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.” Id.

Prior to section 5’s enactment, states could stay ahead of 

plaintiffs and courts “ ‘by passing new discriminatory voting 

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laws as soon as the old ones had been struck down.’ ” Beer v. 

United States, 425 U.S. 130, 140 (1976) (quoting H.R. Rep. 

No. 94-196, at 57–58 (1975)). But section 5 “shift[ed] the 

advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil 

to its victim.” Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 328. It did so by 

placing “the burden on covered jurisdictions to show their 

voting changes are nondiscriminatory before those changes 

can be put into effect.” Shelby Cnty., 811 F. Supp. 2d at 431. 

Section 5 thus “pre-empted the most powerful tools of black 

disenfranchisement,” Nw. Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 2509, resulting 

in “undeniable” improvements in the protection of minority 

voting rights, id. at 2511.

Section 4(b) contains a formula that, as originally 

enacted, applied section 5’s preclearance requirements to any 

state or political subdivision of a state that “maintained a 

voting test or device as of November 1, 1964, and had less 

than 50% voter registration or turnout in the 1964 presidential 

election.” Shelby Cnty., 811 F. Supp. 2d at 432 (citing Voting 

Rights Act of 1965, Pub. L. No. 89-110, § 4(b), 79 Stat. 437, 

438 (“1965 Act”)). Congress chose these criteria carefully. It

knew precisely which states it sought to cover and crafted the 

criteria to capture those jurisdictions. Id. (citing testimony 

before Congress in 2005–2006). Unsurprisingly, then, the 

jurisdictions originally covered in their entirety, Alabama, 

Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and 

Virginia, “were those southern states with the worst historical 

records of racial discrimination in voting.” Id. 

Because section 4(b)’s formula could be both over- and

underinclusive, Congress incorporated two procedures for 

adjusting coverage over time. First, as it existed in 1965, 

section 4(a) allowed jurisdictions to earn exemption from 

coverage by obtaining from a three-judge district court a 

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declaratory judgment that in the previous five years (i.e., 

before they became subject to the Act) they had used no test 

or device “for the purpose or with the effect of denying or 

abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.” 1965 

Act § 4(a). This “bailout” provision, as subsequently 

amended, addresses potential overinclusiveness, allowing 

jurisdictions with clean records to terminate their section 5 

preclearance obligations. Second, section 3(c) authorizes 

federal courts to require preclearance by any non-covered 

state or political subdivision found to have violated the 

Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments. 42 U.S.C. § 1973a(c). 

Specifically, courts presiding over voting discrimination suits 

may “retain jurisdiction for such period as [they] may deem 

appropriate” and order that during that time no voting change 

take effect unless either approved by the court or unopposed 

by the Attorney General. Id. This judicial “bail-in” provision

addresses the formula’s potential underinclusiveness.

As originally enacted in 1965, section 5 was to remain in 

effect for five years. In South Carolina v. Katzenbach, the

Supreme Court sustained the constitutionality of section 5, 

holding that its provisions “are a valid means for carrying out 

the commands of the Fifteenth Amendment.” 383 U.S. at 337.

Congress subsequently renewed the temporary provisions, 

including sections 4(b) and 5, in 1970 (for five years), then in 

1975 (for seven years), and again in 1982 (for twenty-five

years). In each version, “[t]he coverage formula [in section 

4(b)] remained the same, based on the use of voting-eligibility 

tests [or devices] and the rate of registration and turnout 

among all voters, but the pertinent dates for assessing these 

criteria moved from 1964 to include 1968 and eventually 

1972.” Nw. Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 2510. In 1975 Congress 

made one significant change to section 4(b)’s scope: it

amended the definition of “test or device” to include the 

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practice of providing only English-language voting materials 

in jurisdictions with significant non-English-speaking 

populations. Act of Aug. 6, 1975, Pub. L. No. 94-73, § 203,

89 Stat. 400, 401–02 (codified at 42 U.S.C. § 1973b(f)(3)).

Although not altering the basic coverage formula, this change 

expanded section 4(b)’s scope to encompass jurisdictions 

with records of voting discrimination against “language 

minorities.” See Briscoe v. Bell, 432 U.S. 404, 405 (1977).

The Supreme Court sustained the constitutionality of each 

extension, respectively, in Georgia v. United States, 411 U.S. 

526 (1973), City of Rome v. United States, 446 U.S. 156

(1980), and Lopez v. Monterey County, 525 U.S. 266 (1999).

Significantly for the issue before us, the 1982 version of 

the Voting Rights Act made bailout substantially more 

permissive. Prior to 1982, bailout was extremely limited: no 

jurisdiction could bail out if it had used discriminatory voting 

tests or practices when it first became subject to section 5, 

even if it had since eliminated those practices. Shelby Cnty., 

811 F. Supp. 2d at 434. By contrast, after 1982 the Act 

allowed bailout by any jurisdiction with a “clean” voting 

rights record over the previous ten years. Id. The 1982 

reauthorization also permitted a greater number of 

jurisdictions to seek bailout. Previously, “only covered states 

(such as Alabama) or separately-covered political 

subdivisions (such as individual North Carolina counties) 

were eligible to seek bailout.” Id. After 1982, political 

subdivisions within a covered state could bail out even if the 

state as a whole was ineligible. Id.

Setting the stage for this litigation, Congress extended the 

Voting Rights Act for another twenty-five years in 2006. See

Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King 

Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 

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2006, Pub. L. No. 109-246, 120 Stat. 577 (“2006 Act”). In 

doing so, it acted on the basis of a legislative record “over 

15,000 pages in length, and includ[ing] statistics, findings by 

courts and the Justice Department, and first-hand accounts of 

discrimination.” Shelby Cnty., 811 F. Supp. 2d at 435

(internal quotation marks omitted). Congress also amended 

section 5 to overrule the Supreme Court’s decisions in

Georgia v. Ashcroft, 539 U.S. 461, 479–80 (2003) (which 

held that “any assessment of the retrogression of a minority 

group’s effective exercise of the electoral franchise depends 

on an examination of all the relevant circumstances” and that 

“a court should not focus solely on the comparative ability of 

a minority group to elect a candidate of its choice”), and Reno 

v. Bossier Parish School Board, 528 U.S. 320, 328 (2000) 

(“Bossier II”) (which held that “the ‘purpose’ prong of § 5 

covers only retrogressive dilution”). See 2006 Act § 5 

(codified at 42 U.S.C. § 1973c(b)–(d)).

The 2006 Act’s constitutionality was immediately 

challenged by “a small utility district” subject to its 

provisions. See Nw. Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 2508. After finding 

the district ineligible for bailout, the three-judge district court 

concluded that the reauthorized Voting Rights Act was 

constitutional. Nw. Austin Mun. Util. Dist. No. One v. 

Mukasey, 573 F. Supp. 2d 221, 283 (D.D.C. 2008). On 

appeal, the Supreme Court identified two “serious . . . 

questions” about section 5’s continued constitutionality, 

namely, whether the “current burdens” it imposes are 

“justified by current needs,” and whether its “disparate 

geographic coverage is sufficiently related to the problem that 

it targets.” Nw. Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 2512–13. But invoking 

the constitutional avoidance doctrine, id. at 2508, 2513, the 

Court interpreted the statute to allow any covered jurisdiction, 

including the utility district bringing suit in that case, to seek 

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bailout, thus avoiding the need to resolve the “big question,”

id. at 2508: Did Congress exceed its constitutional authority 

when it reauthorized section 5? Now that question is squarely 

presented.

II.

Shelby County filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the 

District of Columbia, seeking both a declaratory judgment 

that sections 4(b) and 5 of the Voting Rights Act are facially 

unconstitutional and a permanent injunction prohibiting the 

Attorney General from enforcing them. Shelby Cnty., 811 F. 

Supp. 2d at 427. Unlike the utility district in Northwest 

Austin, Shelby County never sought bailout, and for good 

reason. Because the county had held several special elections 

under a law for which it failed to seek preclearance and 

because the Attorney General had recently objected to 

annexations and a redistricting plan proposed by a city within 

Shelby County, the County was clearly ineligible for bailout.

See id. at 446 n.6. As the district court—Judge John D. 

Bates—recognized, the “serious constitutional questions”

raised in Northwest Austin could “no longer be avoided.” Id.

at 427.

Addressing these questions in a thorough opinion, the 

district court upheld the constitutionality of the challenged 

provisions and granted summary judgment for the Attorney 

General. After reviewing the extensive legislative record and 

the arguments made by Shelby County, the Attorney General, 

and a group of defendant-intervenors, the district court 

concluded that “Section 5 remains a ‘congruent and 

proportional remedy’ to the 21st century problem of voting 

discrimination in covered jurisdictions.” Id. at 428. 

Responding to the Supreme Court’s concerns in Northwest 

Austin, the district court found the record evidence of 

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contemporary discrimination in covered jurisdictions “plainly 

adequate to justify section 5’s strong remedial and 

preventative measures,” id. at 492 (internal quotation marks 

omitted), and to support Congress’s predictive judgment that 

failure to reauthorize section 5 “ ‘would leave minority 

citizens with the inadequate remedy of a Section 2 action,’ ”

id. at 498 (quoting H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, at 57 (2006)). This 

evidence consisted of thousands of pages of testimony, 

reports, and data regarding racial disparities in voter 

registration, voter turnout, and electoral success; the nature 

and number of section 5 objections; judicial preclearance suits 

and section 5 enforcement actions; successful section 2 

litigation; the use of “more information requests” and federal 

election observers; racially polarized voting; and section 5’s 

deterrent effect. Id. at 465–66. 

As to section 4(b), the district court acknowledged that 

the legislative record “primarily focused on the persistence of 

voting discrimination in covered jurisdictions—rather than on 

the comparative levels of voting discrimination in covered 

and non-covered jurisdictions.” Id. at 507. Nonetheless, the 

district court pointed to “several significant pieces of 

evidence suggesting that the 21st century problem of voting 

discrimination remains more prevalent in those jurisdictions 

that have historically been subject to the preclearance 

requirement”—including the disproportionate number of 

successful section 2 suits in covered jurisdictions and the 

“continued prevalence of voting discrimination in covered 

jurisdictions notwithstanding the considerable deterrent effect 

of Section 5.” Id. at 506–07. Thus, although observing that 

Congress’s reauthorization “ensured that Section 4(b) would 

continue to focus on those jurisdictions with the worst 

historical records of voting discrimination,” id. at 506, the 

district court found this continued focus justified by current

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evidence that discrimination remained concentrated in those 

juridictions. See id. (explaining that Congress did not renew 

the coverage formula to punish past sins, but rather because it 

found “substantial evidence of contemporary voting 

discrimination by the very same jurisdictions that had 

histories of unconstitutional conduct”). Finally, the district 

court emphasized that Congress had based reauthorization not 

on “a perfunctory review of a few isolated examples of voting 

discrimination by covered jurisdictions,” but had 

“ ‘approached its task seriously and with great care.’ ” Id. at 

496 (quoting Nw. Austin, 573 F. Supp. 2d at 265). Given this,

the district court concluded that Congress’s predictive 

judgment about the continued need for section 5 in covered 

jurisdictions was due “substantial deference,” id. at 498

(internal quotation marks omitted), and therefore “decline[d] 

to overturn Congress’s carefully considered judgment,” id. at 

508. Our review is de novo. See McGrath v. Clinton, 666 F.3d 

1377, 1379 (D.C. Cir. 2012) (“We review the district court’s 

decision to grant summary judgment de novo.”).

On appeal, Shelby County reiterates its argument that, 

given the federalism costs section 5 imposes, the provision

can be justified only by contemporary evidence of the kind of 

“ ‘unremitting and ingenious defiance’ ” that existed when the 

Voting Rights Act was originally passed in 1965. Appellant’s 

Br. 8 (quoting Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 309). Insisting that the 

legislative record lacks “evidence of a systematic campaign of 

voting discrimination and gamesmanship by the covered 

jurisdictions,” Shelby County contends that section 5’s 

remedy is unconstitutional because it is no longer congruent 

and proportional to the problem it seeks to cure. Id. at 8–9; 

see also City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507, 520 (1997) 

(“There must be a congruence and proportionality between 

the injury to be prevented or remedied and the means adopted 

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to that end.”). In addition, Shelby County argues, section 4(b) 

contains an “obsolete” coverage formula that fails to identify

the problem jurisdictions, and because the jurisdictions it 

covers are not uniquely problematic, the formula is no longer 

rational “ ‘in both practice and theory.’ ” Appellant’s Br. 11–

12 (quoting Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 330).

III.

Northwest Austin sets the course for our analysis, 

directing us to conduct two principal inquiries. First, 

emphasizing that section 5 “authorizes federal intrusion into 

sensitive areas of state and local policymaking that imposes 

substantial federalism costs,” the Court made clear that

“[p]ast success alone . . . is not adequate justification to retain 

the preclearance requirements.” 129 S. Ct. at 2511. 

Conditions in the South, the Court pointed out, “have 

unquestionably improved”: racial disparities in voter 

registration and turnout have diminished or disappeared, and 

“minority candidates hold office at unprecedented levels.” Id.

Of course, “[i]t may be that these improvements are 

insufficient and that conditions continue to warrant 

preclearance under the Act.” Id. at 2511–12. But “the Act 

imposes current burdens,” and we must determine whether 

those burdens are “justified by current needs.” Id. at 2512.

Second, the Act, through section 4(b)’s coverage 

formula, “differentiates between the States, despite our 

historic tradition that all the States enjoy equal sovereignty.”

Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). And while equal 

sovereignty “ ‘does not bar . . . remedies for local evils,’ ” id.

(omission in original) (quoting Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 328–

29), the Court warned that section 4(b)’s coverage formula 

may “fail[] to account for current political conditions”—that 

is, “[t]he evil that § 5 is meant to address may no longer be 

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concentrated in the jurisdictions singled out for preclearance.”

Id. These concerns, the Court explained, “are underscored by 

the argument” that section 5 may require covered jurisdictions 

to adopt race-conscious measures that, if adopted by noncovered jurisdictions, could violate section 2 of the Act or the 

Fourteenth Amendment. Id. (citing Georgia v. Ashcroft, 539 

U.S. at 491 (Kennedy, J., concurring) (“[C]onsiderations of 

race that would doom a redistricting plan under the 

Fourteenth Amendment or § 2 seem to be what save it under 

§ 5.”)). To be sure, such “[d]istinctions can be justified in 

some cases.” Id. But given section 5’s serious federalism 

costs, Northwest Austin requires that we ask whether section 

4(b)’s “disparate geographic coverage is sufficiently related 

to the problem that it targets.” Id.

Before addressing Northwest Austin’s two questions, we 

must determine the appropriate standard of review. As the 

Supreme Court noted, the standard applied to legislation 

enacted pursuant to Congress’s Fifteenth Amendment power 

remains unsettled. See id. at 2512–13 (noting, but declining to 

resolve the parties’ dispute over the appropriate standard of 

review). Reflecting this uncertainty, Shelby County argues 

that the “congruence and proportionality” standard for 

Fourteenth Amendment legislation applies, see City of 

Boerne, 521 U.S. at 520, whereas the Attorney General insists 

that Congress may use “any rational means” to enforce the 

Fifteenth Amendment, see Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 324. 

Although the Supreme Court declined to resolve this issue in 

Northwest Austin, the questions the Court raised—whether 

section 5’s burdens are justified by current needs and whether 

its disparate geographic reach is sufficiently related to that 

problem—seem to us the very questions one would ask to 

determine whether section 5 is “congruen[t] and 

proportional[] [to] the injury to be prevented,” City of Boerne, 

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521 U.S. at 520. We thus read Northwest Austin as sending a 

powerful signal that congruence and proportionality is the 

appropriate standard of review. In any event, if section 5 

survives the arguably more rigorous “congruent and 

proportional” standard, it would also survive Katzenbach’s 

“rationality” review.

Of course, this does not mean that the Supreme Court’s 

prior decisions upholding the Voting Rights Act are no longer 

relevant. Quite to the contrary, Katzenbach and City of Rome

tell us a great deal about “[t]he evil that § 5 is meant to 

address,” Nw. Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 2512, as well as the types 

of evidence that are probative of “current needs,” id.

Moreover, City of Boerne relied quite heavily on Katzenbach

for the proposition that section 5, as originally enacted and

thrice extended, was a model of congruent and proportional

legislation. See City of Boerne, 521 U.S. at 525–26, 530 

(relying on Katzenbach to explain how the Court evaluates 

remedial legislation under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth 

Amendments); see also id. at 532–33 (describing 

characteristics of the Voting Rights Act, as analyzed by 

Katzenbach and City of Rome, that made it congruent and 

proportional).

We can likewise seek guidance from the Court’s 

Fourteenth Amendment decisions applying the congruent and 

proportional standard to other legislation. In those cases, the 

Court made clear that the record compiled by Congress must 

contain evidence of state “conduct transgressing the 

Fourteenth Amendment’s substantive provisions,” Coleman v. 

Court of Appeals of Md., 132 S. Ct. 1327, 1333 (2012), and 

that invasions of state interests based on “abstract 

generalities,” id. at 1337, or “supposition and conjecture,” id.

at 1336, cannot be sustained. Once satisfied that Congress has

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identified a pattern of constitutional violations, however, the 

Court has deferred to Congress’s judgment, even in the face 

of a rather sparse legislative record. In Nevada Department of 

Human Resources v. Hibbs, for example, the Court upheld the 

constitutionality of the family-care provision of the Family 

and Medical Leave Act, which allows eligible employees to 

take up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave, and “creates a 

private right of action to seek both equitable relief and money 

damages against any employer (including a public agency).” 

538 U.S. 721, 724 (2003) (internal quotation marks omitted). 

Although evidence of discriminatory leave policies by state 

governments was hardly extensive, see Tennessee v. Lane, 

541 U.S. 509, 528–29 & n.17 (2004) (describing the limited 

evidence relied upon in Hibbs, “little of which concerned 

unconstitutional state conduct”), the Court deferred to 

Congress’s “reasonabl[e] conclu[sions],” Hibbs, 538 U.S. at 

734, and held that the evidence was “weighty enough to 

justify” prophylactic legislation, id. at 735. Similarly, in Lane

the Court considered whether Congress had authority under 

the Fourteenth Amendment to pass Title II of the Americans 

with Disabilities Act, which prohibits public entities, 

including states, from discriminating on the basis of disability 

in their services, programs, and activities. 541 U.S. at 513.

Looking into the record and noting the long history of state 

discrimination against disabled individuals, the Court found it

“not difficult to perceive the harm that Title II is designed to 

address.” See id. at 524–25. It held, again with great 

deference to Congress’s take on the evidence, that the record,

“including judicial findings of unconstitutional state action, 

and statistical, legislative, and anecdotal evidence of the 

widespread exclusion of persons with disabilities from the 

enjoyment of public services,” made “clear beyond 

peradventure” that Title II was appropriate prophylactic 

legislation, id. at 529—and this despite the fact that the record 

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included only two reported decisions finding unconstitutional 

state action of the precise type at issue, see id. at 544 

(Rehnquist, C.J., dissenting). By contrast, the Court has found 

that Congress exceeded its Fourteenth Amendment authority 

where the legislative record revealed a “virtually complete 

absence” of evidence of unconstitutional state conduct. Id. at 

521 (majority opinion) (citing Fla. Prepaid Postsecondary 

Educ. Expense Bd. v. Coll. Sav. Bank, 527 U.S. 627, 647–48 

(1999)); see also City of Boerne, 521 U.S. at 530 (legislative 

record “lack[ed] examples of modern instances” of the 

targeted constitutional violations); Kimel v. Fla. Bd. of 

Regents, 528 U.S. 62, 89 (2000) (“Congress never identified 

any pattern of age discrimination by the States, much less any 

discrimination whatsoever that rose to the level of 

constitutional violation.”).

We read this case law with two important qualifications.

First, we deal here with racial discrimination in voting, one of 

the gravest evils that Congress can seek to redress. See Yick 

Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356, 370 (1886) (“[The right to vote] 

is regarded as a fundamental political right, because 

preservative of all rights.”); Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. 

Pena, 515 U.S. 200, 216 (1995) (“racial classifications [are] 

constitutionally suspect and subject to the most rigid scrutiny” 

(citation omitted) (internal quotation marks omitted)). When 

Congress seeks to combat racial discrimination in voting—

protecting both the right to be free from discrimination based 

on race and the right to be free from discrimination in voting, 

two rights subject to heightened scrutiny—it acts at the apex 

of its power. See Hibbs, 538 U.S. at 736 (noting that it is 

“easier for Congress to show a pattern of unconstitutional 

violations” when it enforces rights subject to heightened 

scrutiny); Lane, 541 U.S. at 561–63 (Scalia, J., dissenting) 

(“Giving [Congress’s enforcement powers] more expansive 

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scope with regard to measures directed against racial 

discrimination by the States accords to practices that are 

distinctively violative of the principal purpose of the 

[Reconstruction Amendments] a priority of attention that [the 

Supreme] Court envisioned from the beginning, and that has 

repeatedly been reflected in [the Court’s] opinions.”).

Expressly prohibited by the Fifteenth Amendment, racial 

discrimination in voting is uniquely harmful in several ways: 

it cannot be remedied by money damages and, as Congress 

found, lawsuits to enjoin discriminatory voting laws are 

costly, take years to resolve, and leave those elected under the 

challenged law with the benefit of incumbency.

Second, although the federalism costs imposed by the 

statutes at issue in Hibbs and Lane (abrogating sovereign 

immunity to allow suits against states for money damages) 

are no doubt substantial, the federalism costs imposed by 

section 5 are a great deal more significant. To be sure, in most

cases the preclearance process is “routine” and “efficient[],” 

resulting in prompt approval by the Attorney General and 

rarely if ever delaying elections. See Reauthorizing the Voting 

Rights Act’s Temporary Provisions: Policy Perspectives and 

Views from the Field: Hearing Before the Subcomm. on the 

Constitution, Civil Rights and Propery Rights of the S. Comm.

on the Judiciary, 109th Cong. 312–13 (2006) (testimony of 

Donald M. Wright, North Carolina State Board of Elections) 

(stating that most preclearance submissions “take only a few 

minutes to prepare” and that the Justice Department

cooperates with jurisdictions to ensure that “preclearance 

issue[s] d[o] not delay an election”). But section 5 sweeps 

broadly, requiring preclearance of every voting change no 

matter how minor. Section 5 also places the burden on 

covered jurisdictions to demonstrate to the Attorney General 

or a three-judge district court here in Washington that the 

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proposed law is not discriminatory. Given these significant 

burdens, in order to determine whether section 5 remains 

congruent and proportional we are obligated to undertake a 

review of the record more searching than the Supreme 

Court’s review in Hibbs and Lane.

Although our examination of the record will be probing, 

we remain bound by fundamental principles of judicial 

restraint. Time and time again the Supreme Court has 

emphasized that Congress’s laws are entitled to a 

“presumption of validity.” City of Boerne, 521 U.S. at 535. 

As the Court has explained, when Congress acts pursuant to 

its enforcement authority under the Reconstruction 

Amendments, its judgments about “what legislation is needed

. . . are entitled to much deference.” Id. (internal quotation 

marks omitted). Even when applying intermediate scrutiny, 

the Court has accorded Congress deference “out of respect for 

its authority to exercise the legislative power,” and in 

recognition that Congress “is far better equipped than the 

judiciary to amass and evaluate the vast amounts of data 

bearing upon legislative questions.” Turner Broad. Sys., Inc. 

v. FCC, 520 U.S. 180, 195, 196 (1997) (internal quotation 

marks omitted) (rejecting a First Amendment challenge to the 

“must-carry” provisions of the Cable Television Consumer

Protection and Competition Act). And critically for our 

purposes, although Northwest Austin raises serious questions 

about section 5’s constitutionality, nothing in that opinion 

alters our duty to resolve those questions using traditional 

principles of deferential review. Indeed, the Court reiterated 

not only that “judging the constitutionality of an Act of 

Congress is ‘the gravest and most delicate duty that [a court] 

is called on to perform,’ ” Nw. Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 2513 

(quoting Blodgett v. Holden, 275 U.S. 142, 147–48 (1927) 

(Holmes, J., concurring)), but also that “[t]he Fifteenth 

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Amendment empowers ‘Congress,’ not the Court, to 

determine in the first instance what legislation is needed to 

enforce it,” id.

A.

Guided by these principles, we begin with Northwest 

Austin’s first question: Are the current burdens imposed by 

section 5 “justified by current needs”? 129 S. Ct. at 2512. The 

Supreme Court raised this question because, as it emphasized 

and as Shelby County argues, the conditions which led to the 

passage of the Voting Rights Act “have unquestionably 

improved[,] . . . no doubt due in significant part to the Voting 

Rights Act itself.” Id. at 2511. Congress also recognized this 

progress when it reauthorized the Act, finding that “many of 

the first generation barriers to minority voter registration and 

voter turnout that were in place prior to the [Voting Rights 

Act] have been eliminated.” H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, at 12.

The dissent’s charts nicely display this progress. Racial 

disparities in voter registration and turnout have “narrowed 

considerably” in covered jurisdictions and are now largely 

comparable to disparities nationwide. Id. at 12–17; see also 

Dissenting Op. at 12–13 figs.I & II. Increased minority 

voting, in turn, has “resulted in significant increases in the 

number of African-Americans serving in elected offices.”

H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, at 18; see also Dissenting Op. at 15

fig.III. For example, in the six states fully covered by the 

1965 Act, the number of African Americans serving in 

elected office increased from 345 to 3700 in the decades since 

1965. H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, at 18.

But Congress found that this progress did not tell the 

whole story. It documented “continued registration and 

turnout disparities” in both Virginia and South Carolina. Id. at 

25. Virginia, in particular, “remain[ed] an outlier,” S. Rep. 

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No. 109-295, at 11 (2006): although 71.6 percent of white, 

non-Hispanic voting age residents registered to vote in 2004, 

only 57.4 percent of black voting age residents registered, a 

14.2-point difference. U.S. Census Bureau, Reported Voting 

and Registration of the Total Voting-Age Population, at

tbl.4a, available at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/

socdemo/voting/publications/p20/2004/tables.html (last 

visited May 9, 2012). Also, although the number of African 

Americans holding elected office had increased significantly, 

they continued to face barriers to election for statewide 

positions. Congress found that not one African American had 

yet been elected to statewide office in Mississippi, Louisiana, 

or South Carolina. In other covered states, “ ‘often it is only 

after blacks have been first appointed to a vacancy that they 

are able to win statewide office as incumbents.’ ” H.R. Rep. 

No. 109-478, at 33 (quoting Nat’l Comm’n on the Voting 

Rights Act, Protecting Minority Voters: The Voting Rights 

Act at Work 1982–2005, at 38 (2006) (“Nat’l Comm’n 

Report”)). 

Congress considered other types of evidence that, in its 

judgment, “show[ed] that attempts to discriminate persist and 

evolve, such that Section 5 is still needed to protect minority 

voters in the future.” Id. at 21. It heard accounts of specific 

instances of racial discrimination in voting. It heard analysis 

and opinions by experts on all sides of the issue. It 

considered, among other things, six distinct categories of 

evidence: (1) Attorney General objections issued to block 

proposed voting changes that would, in the Attorney 

General’s judgment, have the purpose or effect of 

discriminating against minorities; (2) “more information 

requests” issued when the Attorney General believes that the

information submitted by a covered jurisdiction is insufficient 

to allow a preclearance determination; (3) successful lawsuits 

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brought under section 2 of the Act; (4) federal observers 

dispatched to monitor elections under section 8 of the Act; (5) 

successful section 5 enforcement actions filed against covered 

jurisdictions for failing to submit voting changes for 

preclearance, as well as requests for preclearance denied by 

the United States District Court for the District of Columbia; 

and (6) evidence that the mere existence of section 5 deters

officials from even proposing discriminatory voting changes.

Finally, Congress heard evidence that case-by-case section 2 

litigation was inadequate to remedy the racial discrimination 

in voting that persisted in covered jurisdictions.

Before delving into the legislative record ourselves, we

consider two arguments raised by Shelby County that, if 

meritorious, would significantly affect how we evaluate that

record.

First, Shelby County argues that section 5 can be 

sustained only on the basis of current evidence of “a 

widespread pattern of electoral gamesmanship showing 

systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment.”

Appellant’s Br. 23. According to the County, the preclearance 

remedy may qualify as congruent and proportional only 

“when it addresses a coordinated campaign of discrimination 

intended to circumvent the remedial effects of direct 

enforcement of Fifteenth Amendment voting rights.” Id. at 7. 

We disagree. For one thing, how could we demand evidence 

of gamesmanship of the sort present at the time of 

Katzenbach given that section 5 preclearance makes such 

tactics virtually impossible? Equally important, Shelby 

County’s argument rests on a misreading of Katzenbach. 

Although the Court did describe the situation in 1965 as one 

of “unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution,”

Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 309, nothing in Katzenbach suggests 

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that such gamesmanship was necessary to the Court’s 

judgment that section 5 was constitutional. Rather, the critical 

factor was that “Congress had found that case-by-case 

litigation was inadequate to combat widespread and persistent 

discrimination in voting.” Id. at 328; see also id. at 313–15

(explaining why laws facilitating case-by-case litigation had 

“proved ineffective”). In City of Rome, the Court, while 

recognizing that “undeniable” progress had been made,

sustained section 5’s constitutionality without ever 

mentioning gamesmanship of any kind, 446 U.S. at 181–82; it 

relied instead on racial disparities in registration, the low 

number of minority elected officials, and the number and 

nature of Attorney General objections, id. at 180–81. 

Reinforcing this interpretation of Katzenbach and City of 

Rome, the Supreme Court explained in City of Boerne that 

“[t]he [Voting Rights Act’s] new, unprecedented remedies 

were deemed necessary given the ineffectiveness of the 

existing voting rights laws, and the slow, costly character of 

case-by-case litigation,” 521 U.S. at 526 (citation omitted).

The Court reiterated the point in Board of Trustees of the 

University of Alabama v. Garrett, 531 U.S. 356, 373 (2001): 

“In [enacting the Voting Rights] Act . . . Congress also 

determined that litigation had proved ineffective . . . .”

This emphasis on the inadequacy of case-by-case 

litigation makes sense: if section 2 litigation is adequate to 

deal with the magnitude and extent of constitutional 

violations in covered jurisdictions, then Congress might have 

no justification for requiring states to preclear their voting 

changes. Put another way, what is needed to make section 5 

congruent and proportional is a pattern of racial 

discrimination in voting so serious and widespread that caseby-case litigation is inadequate. Given this, the question 

before us is not whether the legislative record reflects the kind 

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of “ingenious defiance” that existed prior to 1965, but 

whether Congress has documented sufficiently widespread 

and persistent racial discrimination in voting in covered 

jurisdictions to justify its conclusion that section 2 litigation 

remains inadequate. If it has, then section 5’s “substantial 

federalism costs” remain justified because preclearance is still 

needed to remedy continuing violations of the Fifteenth 

Amendment.

Second, Shelby County urges us to disregard much of the 

evidence Congress considered because it involves “vote 

dilution, going to the weight of the vote once cast, not access 

to the ballot.” Appellant’s Br. 26. Specifically, the County 

faults Congress for relying on selective annexations, certain 

redistricting techniques, at-large elections, and other practices

that do not prevent minorities from voting but instead “dilute 

minority voting strength,” 2006 Act § 2(b)(4)(A). According 

to the County, because the Supreme Court has “never held 

that vote dilution violates the Fifteenth Amendment,” Bossier 

II, 528 U.S. at 334 n.3, we may not rely on such evidence to 

sustain section 5 as a valid exercise of Congress’s Fifteenth 

Amendment enforcement power. 

It is true that neither the Supreme Court nor this court has 

ever held that intentional vote dilution violates the Fifteenth 

Amendment. But the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits vote 

dilution intended “invidiously to minimize or cancel out the 

voting potential of racial or ethnic minorities.” City of Mobile 

v. Bolden, 446 U.S. 55, 66 (1980); see also, e.g., Shaw v. 

Reno, 509 U.S. 630, 641 (1993). Although the Court’s 

previous decisions upholding section 5 focused on Congress’s 

power to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment, the same 

“congruent and proportional” standard, refined by the 

inquiries set forth in Northwest Austin, appears to apply 

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“irrespective of whether Section 5 is considered [Fifteenth 

Amendment] enforcement legislation, [Fourteenth 

Amendment] enforcement legislation, or a kind of hybrid 

legislation enacted pursuant to both amendments.” Shelby 

Cnty., 811 F. Supp. 2d at 462 (footnote omitted); see also City 

of Boerne, 521 U.S. at 518 (suggesting that Congress’s 

“power to enforce the provisions of the Fifteenth 

Amendment” is “parallel” to its power to enforce the 

Fourteenth Amendment). Indeed, when reauthorizing the Act 

in 2006, Congress expressly invoked its enforcement 

authority under both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth 

Amendments. See H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, at 90 (“[T]he 

Committee finds the authority for this legislation under 

amend. XIV, § 5 and amend. XV, § 2.”); id. at 53 & n.136 

(stating that Congress is acting under its Fourteenth and 

Fifteenth Amendment powers in reauthorizing the Voting 

Rights Act). Accordingly, like Congress and the district court, 

we think it appropriate to consider evidence of 

unconstitutional vote dilution in evaluating section 5’s

validity. See City of Rome, 446 U.S. at 181 (citing Congress’s 

finding that “[a]s registration and voting of minority citizens 

increase[], other measures may be resorted to which would 

dilute increasing minority voting strength” as evidence of the 

continued need for section 5 (internal quotation marks 

omitted)).

Consideration of this evidence is especially important 

given that so-called “second generation” tactics like 

intentional vote dilution are in fact decades-old forms of 

gamesmanship. That is, “as African Americans made progress 

in abolishing some of the devices whites had used to prevent 

them from voting,” both in the late nineteenth century and 

again in the 1950s and 1960s, “[o]fficials responded by 

adopting new measures to minimize the impact of black 

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reenfranchisement.” Voting Rights Act: Evidence of 

Continued Need: Hearing Before the Subcomm. on the 

Constitution of the H. Comm. on the Judiciary, 109th Cong. 

141–43 (2006) (“Evidence of Continued Need”). These 

measures—“well-known” tactics such as “ ‘pack[ing]’ ”

minorities into a single district, spreading minority voters 

thinly among several districts, annexing predominately white 

suburbs, and so on—were prevalent “forms of vote dilution”

then, and Congress determined that these persist today. Id. 

Specifically, Congress found that while “first generation 

barriers”—flagrant attempts to deny access to the polls that 

were pervasive at the time of Katzenbach—have diminished, 

“second generation barriers” such as vote dilution have been 

“constructed to prevent minority voters from fully 

participating in the electoral process.” 2006 Act § 2(b)(2)

(congressional findings). Although such methods may be

“more subtle than the visible methods used in 1965,”

Congress concluded that their “effect and results are the same, 

namely a diminishing of the minority community’s ability to 

fully participate in the electoral process and to elect their 

preferred candidates of choice.” H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, at 6.

Having resolved these threshold issues, we return to the 

basic question: Does the legislative record contain sufficient 

probative evidence from which Congress could reasonably 

conclude that racial discrimination in voting in covered 

jurisdictions is so serious and pervasive that section 2 

litigation remains an inadequate remedy? Reviewing the 

record ourselves and focusing on the evidence most probative 

of ongoing constitutional violations, we believe it does.

To begin with, the record contains numerous “examples 

of modern instances” of racial discrimination in voting, City 

of Boerne, 521 U.S. at 530. Just a few recent examples:

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• Kilmichael, Mississippi’s abrupt 2001 decision to 

cancel an election when “an unprecedented number” of 

African Americans ran for office, H.R. Rep. No. 109-

478, at 36–37 (internal quotation marks omitted);

• Webster County, Georgia’s 1998 proposal to reduce the 

black population in three of the education board’s five 

single-member districts after the school district elected a 

majority black school board for the first time, Voting 

Rights Act: Section 5 of the Act—History, Scope, and 

Purpose: Hearing Before Subcomm. on the Constitution 

of the House Judiciary Comm., 109th Cong. 830–31 

(2006) (“History, Scope, and Purpose”);

• Mississippi’s 1995 attempt to evade preclearance and 

revive a dual registration system “initially enacted in 

1892 to disenfranchise Black voters” and previously 

struck down by a federal court, H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, 

at 39; 

• Washington Parish, Louisiana’s 1993 attempt to reduce 

the impact of a majority-African American district by 

“immediately creat[ing] a new at-large seat to ensure 

that no white incumbent would lose his seat,” id. at 38;

• Waller County, Texas’s 2004 attempt to reduce early 

voting at polling places near a historically black 

university and its threats to prosecute students for 

“illegal voting,” after two black students announced 

their intent to run for office, Evidence of Continued 

Need 185–86.

The legislative record also contains examples of overt 

hostility to black voting power by those who control the 

electoral process. In Mississippi, for instance, state legislators 

opposed an early 1990s redistricting plan that would have 

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increased the number of black majority districts, referring to 

the plan publicly as the “black plan” and privately as the 

“nigger plan,” Modern Enforcement of the Voting Rights Act:

Hearing Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 109th Cong. 

22 (2006) (“Modern Enforcement”) (internal quotation marks 

omitted); see also S. Rep. No. 109-295, at 14. In Georgia, the 

state House Reapportionment Committee Chairman “told his 

colleagues on numerous occasions, ‘I don’t want to draw 

nigger districts,’ ” H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, at 67 (quoting 

Busbee v. Smith, 549 F. Supp. 495, 501 (D.D.C. 1982)). The 

district court pointed to numerous additional examples of 

intentional discrimination in the legislative record. See Shelby 

Cnty., 811 F. Supp. 2d at 472–76, 477–79, 480–81, 481–85, 

485–87; see also Nw. Austin, 573 F. Supp. 2d at 258–62, 289–

301.

In addition to these examples of flagrant racial 

discrimination, several categories of evidence in the record 

support Congress’s conclusion that intentional racial 

discrimination in voting remains so serious and widespread in

covered jurisdictions that section 5 preclearance is still 

needed. We explore each in turn.

First, Congress documented hundreds of instances in 

which the Attorney General, acting pursuant to section 5, 

objected to proposed voting changes that he found would 

have a discriminatory purpose or effect. Significantly, 

Congress found that the absolute number of objections has 

not declined since the 1982 reauthorization: the Attorney 

General interposed at least 626 objections during the twentytwo years from 1982 to 2004 (an average of 28.5 each year), 

compared to 490 interposed during the seventeen years from 

1965 to 1982 (an average of 28.8 each year). Evidence of 

Continued Need 172; see also S. Rep. No. 109-295, at 13–14

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(finding 754 objections between 1982 and the first half of 

2006).

Formal objections were not the only way the Attorney 

General blocked potentially discriminatory changes under 

section 5. Congress found that between 1990 and 2005, “more 

information requests” (MIRs) prompted covered jurisdictions 

to withdraw or modify over 800 proposed voting changes. 

Evidence of Continued Need 2553, 2565; H.R. Rep. No. 109-

478, at 40–41. Although MIRs take no position on the merits 

of a preclearance request, Congress had evidence indicating 

that the Attorney General sometimes uses them to “send 

signals to a submitting jurisdiction about the assessment of 

their proposed voting change” and to “promot[e] compliance 

by covered jurisdictions.” Evidence of Continued Need 2541. 

Congress found that because “[t]he actions taken by a 

jurisdiction [in response to an MIR] are often illustrative of 

[its] motives,” the high number of withdrawals and 

modifications made in response to MIRs constitutes

additional evidence of “[e]fforts to discriminate over the past 

25 years.” H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, at 40–41. 

Shelby County contends that section 5 objections and 

MIRs, however numerous, “do[] not signal intentional voting 

discrimination” because they represent only the Attorney 

General’s opinion and need not be based on discriminatory 

intent. Appellant’s Br. 30–31; see also id. at 32. Underlying 

this argument is a fundamental principle with which we 

agree: to sustain section 5, the record must contain “evidence 

of a pattern of constitutional violations,” Hibbs, 538 U.S. at 

729, and voting changes violate the constitution only if 

motivated by discriminatory animus, Reno v. Bossier Parish 

Sch. Bd., 520 U.S. 471, 481 (1997) (“Bossier I”). Although

not all objections rest on an affirmative finding of intentional 

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discrimination, the record contains examples of many that do. 

See Nw. Austin, 573 F. Supp. 2d at 289–301 (appendix 

providing examples of objections based on discriminatory 

intent). Between 1980 and 2004, the Attorney General issued 

at least 423 objections based in whole or in part on 

discriminatory intent. Voting Rights Act: Section 5—

Preclearance Standards: Hearing Before the Subcomm. on 

the Constitution of the H. Comm. on the Judiciary, 109th 

Cong. 180–81 (2005) (“Preclearance Standards”). Moreover, 

in the 1990s, before the Supreme Court limited the Attorney 

General’s ability to object based on discriminatory but nonretrogressive intent, see Bossier II, 528 U.S. 320 (limiting the 

scope of section 5’s purpose prong in a decision overturned 

by the 2006 Act), “the purpose prong of Section 5 had 

become the dominant legal basis for objections,”

Preclearance Standards 177, with seventy-four percent of 

objections based in whole or in part on discriminatory intent, 

id. at 136. Although it is true that objections represent “only 

one side’s opinion,” Appellant’s Br. 30, Congress is entitled 

to rely upon the Attorney General’s considered judgment 

“when it prescribes civil remedies . . . under [section] 2 of the 

Fifteenth Amendment.” Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 330 

(explaining that “Congress obviously may avail itself of 

information from any probative source,” including evidence 

“adduced by the Justice Department”). In fact, in City of 

Rome the Supreme Court considered objections to be

probative evidence of unconstitutional voting discrimination. 

See 446 U.S. at 181.

Shelby County also points out that the percentage of 

proposed voting changes blocked by Attorney General 

objections has steadily declined—from a height of 4.06 

percent (1968–1972) to 0.44 percent (1978–1982) to 0.17 

percent (1993–1997) and to 0.05 percent (1998–2002). An 

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Introduction to the Expiring Provisions of the Voting Rights 

Act and Legal Issues Relating to Reauthorization: Hearing 

Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 109th Cong. 219 

(2006) (“Introduction to the Expiring Provisions”). But the 

most dramatic decline in the objection rate—which, as the 

district court observed, “has always been low,” Shelby Cnty., 

811 F. Supp. 2d at 470—occurred in the 1970s, before the 

Supreme Court upheld the Act for a third time in City of 

Rome. See Introduction to the Expiring Provisions 219. Also, 

the average number of objections per year has not declined, 

suggesting that the level of discrimination has remained 

constant as the number of proposed voting changes, many 

likely quite minor, has increased. See H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, 

at 22 (showing increase in the annual number of voting 

changes submitted for preclearance, from 300–400 per year in 

the early 1970s to 4000–5000 per year in the 1990s and 

2000s). As the district court pointed out, there may be “many 

plausible explanations for the recent decline in objection 

rates.” See Shelby Cnty., 811 F. Supp. 2d at 471. Even in the 

six years from 2000 to 2006, after objection rates had dropped 

to their lowest, Attorney General objections affected some 

660,000 minority voters. The Continuing Need for Section 5 

Pre-Clearance: Hearing Before the S. Comm. on the 

Judiciary, 109th Cong. 58 (2006) (“Continuing Need”).

Ultimately, Congress believed that the absolute number of 

objections represented the better indicator of the extent of 

discrimination in covered jurisdictions. This judgment—

whether to accord greater weight to absolute numbers or to 

objection rates—is precisely the kind that a legislature is “far 

better equipped” than a court to evaluate, Turner Broad., 520 

U.S. at 195 (internal quotation marks omitted).

As for MIRs, we agree with Shelby County that they are 

less probative of discrimination than objections. An MIR does 

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not represent a judgment on the merits, and submitting 

jurisdictions might have many reasons for modifying or 

withdrawing a proposed change in response to one. But the 

record contains evidence from which Congress could 

“reasonabl[y] infer[],” id. (internal quotation marks omitted), 

that at least some withdrawals or modifications reflect the 

submitting jurisdiction’s acknowledgement that the proposed 

change was discriminatory. See Evidence of Continued Need

178 (stating that a jurisdiction’s decision to withdraw a 

proposed changes in response to an MIR “is frequently a tacit 

admission of one or more proposed discriminatory changes”); 

id. at 809–10 (explaining that after the Attorney General 

requested more information on a redistricting plan containing 

only two majority-black districts, the jurisdiction withdrew 

the proposal and ultimately adopted a redistricting plan with 

three majority-black districts); H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, at 41 

(explaining that Monterey County’s proposal to reduce the 

number of polling places received preclearance only after the 

County withdrew five polling place consolidations in 

response to an MIR). Given this, Congress reasonably

concluded that some of the 800-plus withdrawals and 

modifications in response to MIRs “reflect[]” “[e]fforts to 

discriminate over the past 25 years.” H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, 

at 40. 

The second category of evidence relied on by Congress,

successful section 2 litigation, reinforces the pattern of 

discrimination revealed by objections and MIRs. The record 

shows that between 1982 and 2005, minority plaintiffs 

obtained favorable outcomes in some 653 section 2 suits filed 

in covered jurisdictions, providing relief from discriminatory 

voting practices in at least 825 counties. Evidence of 

Continued Need 208, 251. Shelby County faults the district 

court for relying on evidence of successful section 2 litigation 

USCA Case #11-5256 Document #1374370 Filed: 05/18/2012 Page 33 of 100
34

“even though ‘a violation of Section 2 does not require a 

showing of unconstitutional discriminatory intent.’ ”

Appellant’s Br. 34 (quoting Shelby Cnty., 811 F. Supp. 2d at 

481). The County’s premise is correct: although the 

Constitution prohibits only those voting laws motivated by 

discriminatory intent, section 2 prohibits all voting laws for 

which “ ‘based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown 

that the political processes leading to nomination or election 

in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to 

participation by members of a [protected] class.’ ” Bartlett v. 

Strickland, 556 U.S. 1, 10–11 (2009) (quoting 42 U.S.C. 

§ 1973(b)). In practice, however, this “results test,” as applied 

in section 2 cases, requires consideration of factors very 

similar to those used to establish discriminatory intent based 

on circumstantial evidence. Compare Gingles, 478 U.S. at

36–37 (listing factors considered under the results test), with

Rogers v. Lodge, 458 U.S. 613, 623–27 (1982) (relying on 

virtually identical factors to affirm a finding of intentional 

discrimination). Also, as the district court pointed out, “courts 

will avoid deciding constitutional questions” if, as is the case 

in virtually all successful section 2 actions, the litigation can 

be resolved on narrower grounds. Shelby Cnty., 811 F. Supp. 

2d at 482; see also, e.g., White v. Alabama, 74 F.3d 1058, 

1071 n.42 (11th Cir. 1996) (“Because we dispose of the 

district court’s judgment on the ground that it violates the 

Voting Rights Act, we need not, and indeed, should not, 

discuss whether the judgment violates the Equal Protection 

Clause.”). This explains why the legislative record contains so 

few published section 2 cases with judicial findings of 

discriminatory intent, see Dissenting Op. at 26; To Examine 

the Impact and Effectiveness of the Voting Rights Act: 

Hearing Before the Subcomm. on the Constitution of the H. 

Comm. on the Judiciary, 109th Cong. 986–87 (2005)

(“Impact and Effectiveness”) (report by Ellen Katz et al.)—

USCA Case #11-5256 Document #1374370 Filed: 05/18/2012 Page 34 of 100
35

courts have no need to find discriminatory intent once they

find discriminatory effect. But Congress is not so limited. 

Considering the evidence required to prevail in a section 2 

case and accounting for the obligation of Article III courts to

avoid reaching constitutional questions unless necessary, we 

think Congress quite reasonably concluded that successful 

section 2 suits provide powerful evidence of unconstitutional 

discrimination. In addition, as with Attorney General 

objections, we cannot ignore the sheer number of successful 

section 2 cases—653 over 23 years, averaging more than 28 

each year. This high volume of successful section 2 actions is 

particularly dramatic given that Attorney General objections

block discriminatory laws before they can be implemented

and that section 5 deters jurisdictions from even attempting to 

enact such laws, thereby reducing the need for section 2 

litigation in covered jurisdictions. See Continuing Need 26

(explaining that section 5 “makes the covered jurisdiction[s] 

much ‘cleaner’ than they would have been without Section 5 

coverage”).

Third, Congress relied on evidence of “the tens of 

thousands of Federal observers that have been dispatched to 

observe elections in covered jurisdictions.” 2006 Act 

§ 2(b)(5). Specifically, 300 to 600 observers were dispatched

annually between 1984 and 2000, H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, at 

44, amounting to 622 separate dispatches (most or all 

involving multiple observers) to covered jurisdictions,

Evidence of Continued Need 180–82; see also 42 U.S.C. 

§ 1973f(a)(2) (authorizing dispatch of federal observers to 

covered jurisdictions based upon either “written meritorious 

complaints from residents, elected officials, or civic 

participation organizations,” or the Attorney General’s 

judgment that observers are necessary to enforce the 

Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment). Of these, sixty-six 

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36

percent were concentrated in five of the six states originally 

covered by section 5—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, 

Mississippi, and South Carolina. H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, at 

44. In some instances, monitoring by federal observers 

“bec[ame] the foundation of Department of Justice 

enforcement efforts,” as in Conecuh County, Alabama, and 

Johnson County, Georgia, where reports by federal observers 

enabled the federal government to bring suit against county 

officials for discriminatory conduct in polling locations, 

ultimately resulting in consent decrees. Id.; see also Voting

Rights Act: Sections 6 and 8—The Federal Examiner and 

Observer Program: Hearing Before the Subcomm. on the 

Constitution of the H. Comm. on the Judiciary, 109th Cong. 

42–43 (2006) (“Sections 6 and 8”). As Congress saw it, this 

continued need for federal observers in covered jurisdictions 

is indicative of discrimination and “demonstrates that the 

discriminatory conduct experienced by minority voters is not 

solely limited to tactics to dilute the voting strength of 

minorities but continues to include tactics to disenfranchise, 

such as harassment and intimidation inside polling locations.”

H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, at 44.

Shelby County insists that the Attorney General’s 

decision to dispatch federal observers “indicates only that . . . 

there might be conduct with the effect of disenfranchising 

minority citizens, which might or might not be purposeful 

discrimination.” Appellant’s Br. 35–36. As the district court 

explained, however, “observers are not assigned to a 

particular polling location based on sheer speculation; they 

are only dispatched if ‘there is a reasonable belief that 

minority citizens are at risk of being disenfranchised.’ ”

Shelby Cnty., 811 F. Supp. 2d at 486 (quoting H.R. Rep. No. 

109-478, at 44). Indeed, the Justice Department conducts preelection investigations in order to identify jurisdictions where 

USCA Case #11-5256 Document #1374370 Filed: 05/18/2012 Page 36 of 100
37

federal observers are likely to be necessary. See Sections 6 

and 8, at 37–39 (explaining that the Justice Department

conducts pre-election surveys and field investigations to 

identify jurisdictions where federal observers will be needed). 

The record shows that federal observers in fact witnessed 

discrimination at the polls, sometimes in the form of 

intentional harassment, intimidation, or disparate treatment of 

minority voters. See id. at 30–31 (describing discriminatory 

treatment and harassment of minorities by poll officials in 

Alabama); id. at 34 (describing discriminatory treatment of 

minority voters in Texas and Arizona); id. at 43 (describing 

the exclusion of African Americans from service as poll 

workers in Johnson County, Georgia). Thus, although the

deployment of federal observers is hardly conclusive

evidence of unconstitutional discrimination, we think 

Congress could reasonably rely upon it as modest, additional 

evidence of current needs.

Fourth, Congress found evidence of continued 

discrimination in two types of preclearance-related lawsuits. 

Examining the first of these—actions brought to enforce 

section 5’s preclearance requirement—Congress noted that 

“many defiant covered jurisdictions and State and local 

officials continue to enact and enforce changes to voting 

procedures without the Federal Government’s knowledge.”

H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, at 41. Between 1982 and 2004, at 

least 105 successful section 5 enforcement actions were 

brought against such jurisdictions. Evidence of Continued 

Need 250. Shelby County believes that successful section 5 

enforcement actions are “not reliable evidence of intentional 

voting discrimination” because “[t]he most that a section 5 

enforcement action can establish . . . is that a voting change—

and quite possibly a nondiscriminatory voting change—was 

not properly submitted for preclearance.” Appellant’s Br. 34. 

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38

But the legislative record does contain evidence that at least 

some of the 105 successful section 5 enforcement suits were 

initiated in response to attempts by covered jurisdictions to 

implement purposefully discriminatory laws without federal 

oversight. See Shelby Cnty., 811 F. Supp. 2d at 480 

(describing section 5 actions against Mississippi and Waller 

County, Texas, “in which the unprecleared voting changes 

appeared to have been motivated by discriminatory animus”); 

Evidence of Continued Need 176 (explaining that after a 

section 5 enforcement suit forced Mississippi to submit its 

dual registration law for preclearance, the Attorney General 

objected based on the law’s racially discriminatory purpose 

and effect). Therefore, Congress could reasonably have 

concluded that such cases, even if few in number, provide at 

least some evidence of continued willingness to evade the 

Fifteenth Amendment’s protections, for they reveal continued 

efforts by recalcitrant jurisdictions not only to enact

discriminatory voting changes, but to do so in defiance of

section 5’s preclearance requirement. 

In addition to section 5 enforcement suits, Congress 

found evidence of continued discrimination in “the number of 

requests for declaratory judgments [for preclearance] denied 

by the United States District Court for the District of 

Columbia.” 2006 Act § 2(b)(4)(B). The number of 

unsuccessful judicial preclearance actions appears to have 

remained roughly constant since 1966: twenty-five requests 

were denied or withdrawn between 1982 and 2004, compared 

to seventeen between 1966 and 1982. Evidence of Continued 

Need 177–78, 275. Shelby County does not contest the 

relevance of this evidence.

Finally, and bolstering its conclusion that section 5 

remains necessary, Congress “f[ound] that the existence of 

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39

Section 5 deterred covered jurisdictions from even attempting 

to enact discriminatory voting changes.” H.R. Rep. No. 109-

478, at 24. In Congress’s view, “Section 5’s strong deterrent 

effect” and “the number of voting changes that have never 

gone forward as a result of [that effect]” are “[a]s important 

as the number of objections that have been interposed to 

protect minority voters against discriminatory changes” that 

had actually been proposed. Id. As Congress explained, 

“ ‘[o]nce officials in covered jurisdictions become aware of 

the logic of preclearance, they tend to understand that 

submitting discriminatory changes is a waste of taxpayer time 

and money and interferes with their own timetables, because 

the chances are good that an objection will result.’ ” Id.

(quoting Nat’l Comm’n Report 57). For this reason, the mere 

existence of section 5 “ ‘encourage[s] the legislature to ensure 

that any voting changes would not have a discriminatory 

effect on minority voters, and that it would not become 

embroiled in the preclearance process.’ ” Id. (quoting 

Laughlin McDonald, The Case for Extending and Amending 

the Voting Rights Act: Voting Rights Litigation, 1982–2006: 

A Report of the Voting Rights Project of the American Civil 

Liberties Union 15 (2006)). Congress considered testimony

that section 5 has had just this effect on state and local 

redistricting processes. See H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, at 24 

(describing section 5’s “critical” influence on the Georgia 

legislature’s redistricting process, which culminated in a plan 

that was precleared with no objection by the Attorney General 

(internal quotation marks omitted)); Evidence of Continued 

Need 362–63 (explaining how concerns about obtaining 

preclearance prevented Fredericksburg, Virginia, from 

eliminating an African American majority district). In other 

words, Congress had “some reason to believe that without 

[section 5’s] deterrent effect on potential misconduct,” the 

USCA Case #11-5256 Document #1374370 Filed: 05/18/2012 Page 39 of 100
40

evidence of continued discrimination in covered jurisdictions 

“might be considerably worse.” S. Rep. No. 109-295, at 11.

Shelby County argues that Congress’s finding of 

deterrence reflects “ ‘outdated assumptions about racial 

attitudes in the covered jurisdictions’ ” that we should not 

“indulge[].” Appellant’s Br. 38 (quoting Nw. Austin, 129 S. 

Ct. at 2525 (Thomas, J., concurring in judgment in part and 

dissenting in part)). We agree that evaluating section 5’s 

deterrent effect raises sensitive and difficult issues. As the 

dissent rightly points out, the claimed effect is hard to 

measure empirically and even harder to consider judicially. 

Dissenting Op. at 24. We also agree with the dissent that 

section 5 could not stand based on claims of deterrence alone, 

nor could deterrence be used in some hypothetical case to 

justify renewal “to the crack of doom,” id. But the difficulty 

of quantifying the statute’s deterrent effect is no reason to 

summarily reject Congress’s finding that the evidence of 

racial discrimination in voting would look worse without 

section 5—a finding that flows from record evidence 

unchallenged by the dissent. As explained above, Congress’s 

deterrent effect finding rests on evidence of current and 

widespread voting discrimination, as well as on testimony 

indicating that section 5’s mere existence prompts state and 

local legislators to conform their conduct to the law. And 

Congress’s finding—that is, a finding about how the world 

would have looked absent section 5—rests on precisely the 

type of fact-based, predictive judgment that courts are illequipped to second guess. See Turner Broad., 520 U.S. at 195 

(“In reviewing the constitutionality of a statute, courts must 

accord substantial deference to the predictive judgments of 

Congress.” (internal quotation marks omitted)).

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41

This brings us, then, to Congress’s ultimate conclusion. 

After considering the entire record, including

• 626 Attorney General objections that blocked

discriminatory voting changes;

• 653 successful section 2 cases;

• over 800 proposed voting changes withdrawn or 

modified in response to MIRs;

• tens of thousands of observers sent to covered

jurisdictions;

• 105 successful section 5 enforcement actions;

• 25 unsuccessful judicial preclearance actions;

• and section 5’s strong deterrent effect, i.e., “the 

number of voting changes that have never gone 

forward as a result of Section 5,” H.R. Rep. No. 109-

478, at 24;

Congress found that serious and widespread intentional 

discrimination persisted in covered jurisdictions and that 

“case-by-case enforcement alone . . . would leave minority 

citizens with [an] inadequate remedy.” Id. at 57. In reaching 

this conclusion, Congress considered evidence that section 2 

claims involve “intensely complex litigation that is both 

costly and time-consuming.” Modern Enforcement 96; see 

also Introduction to the Expiring Provisions 141 (describing a 

Federal Judicial Center study finding that voting rights cases 

require nearly four times more work than an average district 

court case and rank as the fifth most work-intensive of the 

sixty-three types of cases analyzed); City of Boerne, 521 U.S 

at 526 (noting the “slow costly character of case-by-case 

litigation” under section 2). It heard from witnesses who 

explained that “it is incredibly difficult for minority voters to 

pull together the resources needed” to pursue a section 2 

lawsuit, particularly at the local level and in rural 

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42

communities. Modern Enforcement 96; see also History,

Scope, and Purpose 84 (explaining that voters “in local 

communities and particularly in rural areas . . . do not have 

access to the means to bring litigation under Section 2”). Such 

testimony is particularly significant given that the vast 

majority of section 5 objections (92.5 percent from 2000 to 

2005) pertained to local voting changes. See Michael J. Pitts, 

Let’s Not Call the Whole Thing Off Just Yet: A Response to 

Samuel Issacharoff’s Suggestion to Scuttle Section 5 of the 

Voting Rights Act, 84 Neb. L. Rev. 605, 612–13 (2005); see 

also id. at 616 (“[S]ection 2 cases are much less likely to be 

filed when it comes to redistricting in smaller 

jurisdictions[.]”). Congress also heard testimony that during 

the time it takes to litigate a section 2 action—often several 

years—proponents of a discriminatory law may enjoy its 

benefits, potentially winning elections and gaining the 

advantage of incumbency before the law is overturned. 

Impact and Effectiveness 43–44. Given all of this, and given

the magnitude and persistence of discrimination in covered 

jurisdictions, Congress concluded that case-by-case 

litigation—slow, costly, and lacking section 5’s prophylactic 

effect—“would be ineffective to protect the rights of minority 

voters.” H.R. Rep. No. 109-478, at 57. 

According to Shelby County, “[e]valuation of the 

probative evidence shows there is no longer systematic 

resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment in the covered 

jurisdictions that cannot be solved through case-by-case 

litigation.” Appellant’s Br. 38. Congress, however, reached a 

different conclusion, and as explained above, the County has 

offered no basis for thinking that Congress’s judgment is

either unreasonable or unsupported by probative evidence. 

The dissent accuses us of “overstat[ing] the inadequacies of 

§ 2, such as cost and the consequences of delay.” Dissenting 

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43

Op. at 8. But the conclusion that section 2 is inadequate is 

Congress’s, not ours. The dissent believes that the costs of 

section 2 actions can “be assumed by the Department of 

Justice,” id., but it cites nothing in the record to support such

speculation. The dissent also believes that “courts may as 

always use the standard remedy of a preliminary injunction to 

prevent irreparable harm caused by adjudicative delay.” Id. at 

8–9. But Congress knows that plaintiffs can seek preliminary 

injunctions and reasonably determined that this possibility—

that plaintiffs with few resources litigating a fact-intensive 

section 2 case will be able to satisfy the heavy burden 

required for preliminary injunctive relief—was insufficient to 

alleviate its concerns about the inadequacy of section 2 

actions.

The point at which section 5’s strong medicine becomes 

unnecessary and therefore no longer congruent and 

proportional turns on several critical considerations, including 

the pervasiveness of serious racial discrimination in voting in 

covered jurisdictions; the continued need for section 5’s 

deterrent and blocking effect; and the adequacy of section 2 

litigation. These are quintessentially legislative judgments, 

and Congress, after assembling and analyzing an extensive 

record, made its decision: section 5’s work is not yet done.

Insofar as Congress’s conclusions rest on predictive 

judgments, we must, contrary to the dissent’s approach, apply 

a standard of review even “more deferential than we accord to 

judgments of an administrative agency.” Turner Broad., 520 

U.S. at 195. Given that we may not “displace [an agency’s] 

choice between two fairly conflicting views, even though the 

court would justifiably have made a different choice had the 

matter been before it de novo,” Universal Camera Corp. v. 

NLRB, 340 U.S. 474, 488 (1951), we certainly cannot do so 

here. Of course, given the heavy federalism costs that section 

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44

5 imposes, our job is to ensure that Congress’s judgment is 

reasonable and rests on substantial probative evidence. See 

Turner Broad., 520 U.S. at 195 (“In reviewing the 

constitutionality of a statute . . . [o]ur sole obligation is to 

assure that, in formulating its judgments, Congress has drawn 

reasonable inferences based on substantial evidence.” 

(internal quotation marks omitted)). After thoroughly 

scrutinizing the record and given that overt racial 

discrimination persists in covered jurisdictions 

notwithstanding decades of section 5 preclearance, we, like 

the district court, are satisfied that Congress’s judgment 

deserves judicial deference.

B.

Having concluded that section 5’s “current burdens” are 

indeed justified by “current needs,” we proceed to the second 

Northwest Austin inquiry: whether the record supports the 

requisite “showing that a statute’s disparate geographic 

coverage is sufficiently related to the problem that it targets.”

129 S. Ct. at 2512. Recall that this requirement stems from 

the Court’s concern that “[t]he Act . . . differentiates between 

the States, despite our historic tradition that all the States 

enjoy ‘equal sovereignty.’ ” Id. “The evil that § 5 is meant to 

address,” the Court observed, “may no longer be concentrated 

in the jurisdictions singled out [by section 4(b)] for 

preclearance.” Id.

Before examining the record ourselves, we emphasize 

that the Act’s disparate geographic coverage—and its relation 

to the problem of voting discrimination—depends not only on 

section 4(b)’s formula, but on the statute as a whole, 

including its mechanisms for bail-in and bailout. Bailout 

functions as an integral feature of section 4’s coverage 

scheme: jurisdictions are subject to section 5 only if (1) they 

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45

are captured by section 4(b), and (2) they have not bailed out, 

meaning that they have failed to demonstrate a clean voting 

record as defined in section 4(a). See 42 U.S.C. §§ 1973b(a), 

1973c(a). In addition, jurisdictions not captured by section 

4(b) but which nonetheless have serious, recent records of 

voting discrimination, may be “bailed in”—i.e., subjected to 

section 5 preclearance—pursuant to section 3(c). See 42 

U.S.C. § 1973a(c). Therefore, the question before us is 

whether the statute as a whole, not just the section 4(b) 

formula, ensures that jurisdictions subject to section 5 are 

those in which unconstitutional voting discrimination is 

concentrated. 

The most concrete evidence comparing covered and noncovered jurisdictions in the legislative record comes from a 

study of section 2 cases published on Westlaw or Lexis

between 1982 and 2004. Impact and Effectiveness 964–1124

(report by Ellen Katz et al.). Known as the Katz study, it

reached two key findings suggesting that racial discrimination

in voting remains “concentrated in the jurisdictions singled 

out for preclearance,” Nw. Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 2512. First, 

the study found that of the 114 published decisions resulting 

in outcomes favorable to minority plaintiffs, 64 originated in 

covered jurisdictions, while only 50 originated in non-covered

jurisdictions. Thus, although covered jurisdictions account for 

less than 25 percent of the country’s population, they

accounted for 56 percent of successful section 2 litigation 

since 1982. Impact and Effectiveness 974; see also H.R. Rep. 

No. 109-478, at 53. When the Katz data is adjusted to reflect

these population differences (based on the Census Bureau’s 

2004 population estimates, the most recent data then available 

to Congress), the rate of successful section 2 cases in covered 

jurisdictions (.94 per million residents) is nearly four times 

the rate in non-covered jurisdictions (.25 per million 

USCA Case #11-5256 Document #1374370 Filed: 05/18/2012 Page 45 of 100
46

residents), as illustrated in the chart below. See Ellen Katz & 

The Voting Rights Initiative, VRI Database Master List 

(2006), http://sitemaker.umich.edu/votingrights/files/master

list.xls; U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Section 5 Covered 

Jurisdictions, http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/sec_5/

covered.php (last visited May 9, 2012); U.S. Census Bureau, 

Annual Estimates of the Population for the United States and 

States, and for Puerto Rico: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2004, 

available at http://www.census.gov/popest/data/historical/

2000s/vintage_2004/state.html (last visited May 9, 2012);

U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Estimates of the Resident 

Population for Counties: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2004, 

available at http://www.census.gov/popest/data/counties/

totals/2004/CO-EST2004-01.html (last visited May 9, 2012); 

U.S. Census Bureau, Population Estimates: Minor Civil 

Divisions: 2000 to 2004, available at http://www.census.gov/

popest/data/cities/totals/2004/SUB-EST2004-5.html (last 

visited May 9, 2012).

0.00

0.10

0.20

0.30

0.40

0.50

0.60

0.70

0.80

0.90

1.00

Covered Jurisdictions Non-Covered 

Jurisdictions

Cases per Million Residents

Successful Published Section 2 Cases 

per Million Residents

USCA Case #11-5256 Document #1374370 Filed: 05/18/2012 Page 46 of 100
47

Second, the study found higher success rates in covered 

jurisdictions than in non-covered jurisdictions. Specifically, 

40.5 percent of published section 2 decisions in covered 

jurisdictions resulted in favorable outcomes for plaintiffs, 

compared to only 30 percent in non-covered jurisdictions. 

Impact and Effectiveness 974. 

The difference between covered and non-covered 

jurisdictions becomes even more pronounced when 

unpublished section 2 decisions—primarily court-approved 

settlements—are taken into account. As the Katz study noted, 

published section 2 lawsuits “represent only a portion of the 

section 2 claims filed or decided since 1982” since many 

claims were settled or otherwise resolved without a published 

opinion. Id. at 974. According to data compiled by the 

National Commission on the Voting Rights Act and Justice 

Department historian Peyton McCrary, there have been at 

least 686 unpublished successful section 2 cases since 1982, 

amounting to a total of some 800 published and unpublished 

cases with favorable outcomes for minority voters. See Decl. 

of Dr. Peyton McCrary 13 (“McCrary Decl.”). Of these, 

approximately 81 percent were filed in covered jurisdictions. 

Id. When this data is broken down state-by-state, separately 

identifying covered and non-covered portions of partially 

covered states, the concentration of successful section 2 cases 

in the covered jurisdictions is striking. Of the eight states with

the highest number of successful published and unpublished

section 2 cases per million residents—Alabama, Mississippi, 

Arkansas, Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, and the covered 

portions of South Dakota and North Carolina—all but one are 

covered. See Supp. Decl. of Dr. Peyton McCrary 3–7; U.S. 

Dep’t of Justice, Section 5 Covered Jurisdictions, 

http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/sec_5/covered.php (last 

visited May 9, 2012); U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Estimates 

USCA Case #11-5256 Document #1374370 Filed: 05/18/2012 Page 47 of 100
48

of the Population for the United States and States, and for 

Puerto Rico: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2004, available at

http://www.census.gov/popest/data/historical/2000s/vintage

_2004/state.html (last visited May 9, 2012); U.S. Census 

Bureau, Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for 

Counties: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2004, available at 

http://www.census.gov/popest/data/counties/totals/2004/COEST2004-01.html (last visited May 9, 2012); U.S. Census 

Bureau, Population Estimates: Minor Civil Divisions: 2000 to 

2004, available at http://www.census.gov/popest/data/cities/

totals/2004/SUB-EST2004-5.html (last visited May 9, 2012). 

The only exception is Arkansas, which, though not captured 

by section 4(b), was subjected to partial preclearance pursuant 

to a 1990 federal court order, i.e., “bailed in.” See Jeffers v. 

Clinton, 740 F. Supp. 585, 601–02 (E.D. Ark. 1990). 

Similarly, of the fourteen states with the highest number of 

successful published and unpublished section 2 cases per 

million residents—the eight listed above, plus Montana, 

Louisiana, New Mexico, Virginia, and the non-covered 

portions of South Dakota and North Carolina—eleven are 

either covered, including the seven states originally covered 

by the 1965 Act, or were bailed in for some period (Arkansas 

and New Mexico). See Travis Crum, Note, The Voting Rights 

Act’s Secret Weapon: Pocket Trigger Litigation and Dynamic 

Preclearance, 119 Yale L.J. 1992, 2010 & nn.100–01 (2010)

(discussing bail-in of Arkansas and New Mexico). This data

is displayed in the chart on the following page.

USCA Case #11-5256 Document #1374370 Filed: 05/18/2012 Page 48 of 100
05

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

South Dakota - C

Alabama

Mississippi

North Carolina - C

Arkansas

Texas

South Carolina

Georgia

Montana

South Dakota - NC

Louisiana

New Mexico

North Carolina - NC

Virginia

Rhode Island

North Dakota

Delaware

California - C

Florida - NC

Tennessee

Maryland

Illinois

Hawaii

New York - C

Colorado

Florida - C

Indiana

Nebraska

Connecticut

New York - NC

Massachusetts

California - NC

Utah

Arizona

Missouri

Pennsylvania

New Jersey

Wisconsin

Cases Per Million Residents

Successful Published and Unpublished Section 2 Cases 

per Million Residents

Bailed

Jurisdictions (C)

Covered -In 

Non

Jurisdictions -Covered 

(NC)

Jurisdictions 

49

USCA Case #11-5256 Document #1374370 Filed: 05/18/2012 Page 49 of 100
50

Shelby County objects to the use of unpublished section 2

data, pointing out that although Congress considered the 

National Commission’s analysis of unpublished cases in 

covered jurisdictions, the legislative record does not contain 

McCrary’s analysis of unpublished cases in non-covered

jurisdictions. We agree that there are reasons to approach this

data with caution: McCrary prepared his analysis after the 

2006 reauthorization, and because his data regarding 

unpublished cases in non-covered jurisdictions was collected 

separately from the data on unpublished cases in covered

jurisdictions, we cannot be certain that the data collection 

methods were identical. That said, the Supreme Court has 

considered post-enactment evidence to find at least one law 

congruent and proportional, see Lane, 541 U.S. at 524–25

nn.6–9 & 13 (citing articles and cases published ten or more 

years after the Americans with Disabilities Act was enacted, 

as well as recent versions of statutes and regulations), and 

here a majority of the unpublished cases from non-covered 

jurisdictions (as well as all from covered jurisdictions)

appears in the legislative record, see McCrary Decl. 10. Also, 

while the Katz data on published cases is necessarily 

underinclusive, see Impact and Effectiveness 974 (explaining 

that the published cases analyzed by the Katz study “represent 

only a portion” of all section 2 actions), Shelby County has 

identified no errors or inconsistencies in the data analyzed by 

McCrary. Indeed, McCrary points out that even if his 

methodology identified only half of the unpublished cases in 

non-covered jurisdictions, “there would still be 393 more

settlements resolved favorably for minority voters in” covered 

jurisdictions. McCrary Decl. 11. For these reasons, although 

we would not rely solely on the combined published and 

unpublished data, we think it provides helpful additional 

evidence that corroborates the disparities in the level of 

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discrimination between covered and non-covered jurisdictions 

revealed by the published data. 

The section 2 data, moreover, does not tell the whole 

story. As explained above, Congress found that section 5, 

which operates only in covered jurisdictions, deters or blocks

many discriminatory voting laws before they can ever take 

effect and become the target of section 2 litigation. “Section 

5’s reach in preventing discrimination is broad. Its strength 

lies not only in the number of discriminatory voting changes it 

has thwarted, but can also be measured by the submissions 

that have been withdrawn from consideration, the submissions 

that have been altered by jurisdictions in order to comply with 

the [Voting Rights Act], or in the discriminatory voting 

changes that have never materialized.” H.R. Rep. No. 109-

478, at 36. Accordingly, if discrimination were evenly 

distributed throughout the nation, we would expect to see 

fewer successful section 2 cases in covered jurisdictions than 

in non-covered jurisdictions. See Continuing Need 26 

(explaining that section 5 “makes the covered jurisdiction[s] 

much ‘cleaner’ than they would have been without Section 5 

coverage”). Yet we see substantially more.

Shelby County makes two main arguments in response to 

this evidence. First, citing Katzenbach’s finding that the 

coverage formula was “rational in both practice and theory,”

383 U.S. at 330, it contends that section 4(b) is irrational 

because it relies on “decades-old data.” Appellant’s Br. 59. “It 

cannot be constitutional,” Shelby County insists, “to rely on 

decades-old voting data to establish current voting 

discrimination.” Id. In addition, the County claims that in

1965 Congress was concerned with “first-generation”

barriers—tests and devices that denied access to the ballot—

and crafted the coverage formula to capture states that erected

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52

such barriers and had low registration rates. But in 2006, 

although Congress was more concerned with “secondgeneration” barriers—vote dilution techniques that weaken 

“minority voting effectiveness”—it retained a coverage 

formula aimed at first-generation problems. Thus, Shelby 

County concludes, “[t]here is a serious mismatch between the 

conduct targeted by Congress and the factors that trigger 

coverage under Section 4(b).” Id. at 60.

This argument rests on a misunderstanding of the 

coverage formula. As the district court explained, the election 

years that serve as coverage “triggers” under section 4(b) 

“were never selected because of something special that 

occurred in those years.” Shelby Cnty., 811 F. Supp. 2d at 

505. Instead, Congress identified the jurisdictions it sought to 

cover—those for which it had “evidence of actual voting 

discrimination,” Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 329—and then 

worked backward, reverse-engineering a formula to cover

those jurisdictions. See id. (explaining that “Congress began 

work with reliable evidence of actual voting discrimination in 

a great majority of the States and political subdivisions 

affected by the new remedies of the Act” and that it 

“eventually evolved” a formula “to describe these areas”).

The coverage formula relied on tests and devices “because of 

their long history as a tool for perpetrating the evil,” and 

voting rates because “widespread disenfranchisement must 

inevitably affect the number of actual voters.” Id. at 330. In 

other words, Congress chose the section 4(b) criteria not 

because tests, devices, and low participation rates were all it 

sought to target, but because they served as accurate proxies 

for pernicious racial discrimination in voting. The question, 

then, is not whether the formula relies on old data or 

techniques, but instead whether it, together with bail-in and 

bailout, continues to identify the jurisdictions with the worst 

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problems. If it does, then even though the formula rests on 

decades-old factors, the statute is rational in theory because its 

“disparate geographic coverage” remains “sufficiently related 

to the problem that it targets.” Nw. Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 2512.

Of course, Shelby County’s real argument is that the 

statute fails this test, i.e., that it no longer actually identifies 

the jurisdictions “uniquely interfering with the right Congress 

is seeking to protect through preclearance.” Appellant’s Br. 

62. The County points out that Congress never made a finding 

that racial discrimination in voting was “concentrated in the 

jurisdictions singled out for preclearance.” Nw. Austin, 129 S. 

Ct. at 2512. The County also argues that the Katz study is at 

best inconclusive, for some non-covered states, such as 

Illinois and the non-covered portions of New York, had more 

successful published section 2 lawsuits than did several

covered states. In any event, it claims, “aggregated statistics 

showing slightly more Section 2 litigation with ‘favorable 

outcomes’ in covered jurisdictions as a group is not a rational 

basis for subjecting individually-targeted States to another 25 

years of preclearance.” Appellant’s Br. 70.

Shelby County’s first point—that Congress failed to 

make a finding—is easily answered. Congress did not have to. 

United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549, 562 (1995) (Congress

“normally is not required to make formal findings” in order to 

legislate). The proper question is whether the record contains 

sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the formula continues 

to target jurisdictions with the most serious problems. See Nw. 

Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 2512. This presents a close question. The

record on this issue is less robust than the evidence of 

continued discrimination, see supra Part III.A, although this is 

in part due to the difficulty of comparing jurisdictions that 

have been subject to two very different enforcement regimes, 

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i.e., covered jurisdictions are subject to both sections 2 and 5 

while non-covered jurisdictions are subject only to section 2. 

And although the Katz data in the aggregate does suggest that 

discrimination is concentrated in covered jurisdictions, just 

three covered states—Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi—

account for much of the disparity. The covered states in the 

middle of the pack—North Carolina, South Carolina, 

Virginia, Texas, and Georgia—are about on par with the 

worst non-covered jurisdictions. And some covered states—

Alaska and Arizona—had no successful published section 2 

cases at all.

As explained above, however, this data presents an 

incomplete picture of covered jurisdictions. When we 

consider the Katz data in conjunction with other record 

evidence, the picture looks quite different. For instance,

although Georgia had only three successful published section

2 cases between 1982 and 2004, during that time the state had

66 successful unpublished section 2 cases, 83 section 5 

objections, and 17 successful section 5 enforcement actions.

Evidence of Continued Need 250–51, 272. In addition, 

between 1990 and 2005, jurisdictions in Georgia withdrew 90 

proposed voting changes in response to MIRs. Id. at 2566. 

South Carolina is similar. Although the state had only 3 

successful published section 2 cases, it had 30 successful 

unpublished section 2 cases, 74 section 5 objections, and 10 

successful section 5 enforcement actions, as well as 26 voting 

changes withdrawn in response to MIRs and 51 changes that 

could not lawfully be implemented for failure to respond to 

MIRs. Id. at 250–51, 272, 2566. South Carolina, moreover, is 

one of the covered states that not only has continued racial 

disparities in voter registration and turnout, but that has never 

elected an African American to statewide office. See supra p. 

22. Accordingly, even if only a relatively small portion of 

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objections, withdrawn voting changes, and successful section 

5 enforcement actions correspond to unconstitutional conduct, 

and even if there are substantially more successful 

unpublished section 2 cases in non-covered jurisdictions than 

the McCrary data reveals, these middle-range covered 

jurisdictions appear to be engaged in much more 

unconstitutional discrimination compared to non-covered 

jurisdictions than the Katz data alone suggests. In fact, the 

discrepancy between covered and non-covered jurisdictions is 

likely even greater given that, as Congress found, the mere 

existence of section 5 deters unconstitutional behavior in the 

covered jurisdictions. That is, the middle-range covered states 

appear comparable to some non-covered jurisdictions only 

because section 5’s deterrent and blocking effect screens out 

discriminatory laws before section 2 litigation becomes 

necessary. Had section 5 not been in effect, one would expect

significantly more discrimination in North Carolina, South 

Carolina, Virginia, Texas, and Georgia, all covered by section 

5, than in the non-covered states with the worst records. See

S. Rep. No. 109-295, at 11 (suggesting that “without the 

Voting Rights Act’s deterrent effect,” the evidence of 

discrimination in the covered jurisdictions “might be 

considerably worse”).

To be sure, the coverage formula’s fit is not perfect. But 

the fit was hardly perfect in 1965. Accordingly, Katzenbach’s 

discussion of this issue offers a helpful guide for our current 

inquiry, particularly when we consider all probative record 

evidence of recent discrimination—and not just the small 

subset of section 2 cases relied upon by the dissent, see

Dissenting Op. at 25–26. In 1965, the formula covered three 

states in “which federal courts ha[d] repeatedly found 

substantial voting discrimination”—Alabama, Louisiana, and 

Mississippi, Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 329, the same three 

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states that, notwithstanding more than forty years of section 5 

enforcement, still account for the highest rates of published 

successful section 2 litigation, as well as large numbers of

unpublished successful section 2 cases, section 5 objections,

federal observer coverages, and voting changes withdrawn or 

modified in response to MIRs. But the 1965 formula also 

“embrace[d] two other States—Georgia and South Carolina—

plus large portions of a third State—North Carolina—for 

which there was more fragmentary evidence of recent voting 

discrimination mainly adduced by the Justice Department and 

the Civil Rights Commission.” Id. at 329–30. Today, the 

middle-range covered jurisdictions—North Carolina, South 

Carolina, Virginia, Texas, and Georgia—look similar: 

although the legislative record contains fewer judicial 

findings of racial discrimination in these states, it contains at 

least fragmentary evidence, in part based on Attorney General 

objections, that these states continue to engage in

unconstitutional racial discrimination in voting. Finally, the 

1965 formula swept in several other jurisdictions—including 

Alaska, Virginia, and counties in Arizona, Hawaii, and 

Idaho—for which Congress apparently had no evidence of 

actual voting discrimination. See id. at 318, 329–30. Today, 

the Act likewise encompasses jurisdictions for which there is

some evidence of continued discrimination—Arizona and the 

covered counties of California, Florida, and New York, see

Evidence of Continued Need 250–51, 272—as well as

jurisdictions for which there appears little or no evidence of 

current problems—Alaska and a few towns in Michigan and 

New Hampshire.

Critically, moreover, and as noted above, in determining 

whether section 5 is “sufficiently related to the problem that it 

targets,” we look not just at the section 4(b) formula, but at 

the statute as a whole, including its provisions for bail-in and 

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bailout. Bail-in allows jurisdictions not captured by section 

4’s coverage formula, but which nonetheless discriminate in 

voting, to be subjected to section 5 preclearance. Thus, two 

non-covered states with high numbers of successful published

and unpublished section 2 cases—Arkansas and New 

Mexico—were subjected to partial preclearance under the 

bail-in provision. See Jeffers, 740 F. Supp. at 601–02; Crum,

119 Yale L.J. at 2010 & n.101 (citing Sanchez v. Anaya, No. 

82-0067M, slip op. at 8 (D.N.M. Dec. 17, 1984)). Federal 

courts have also bailed in jurisdictions in several states, 

including Los Angeles County, California; Escambia County, 

Florida; Thurston County, Nebraska; Bernalillo County, New 

Mexico; Buffalo County, South Dakota; Charles Mix County, 

South Dakota; and the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. See 

Crum, 119 Yale L.J. at 2010 & nn.102–08.

Bailout plays an even more important role in ensuring 

that section 5 covers only those jurisdictions with the worst 

records of racial discrimination in voting. As the Supreme 

Court explained in City of Boerne, the availability of bailout 

“reduce[s] the possibility of overbreadth” and helps “ensure 

Congress’ means are proportionate to [its] ends.” 521 U.S. at 

533; see also Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 329 (“Acknowledging 

the possibility of overbreadth, the Act provides for 

termination of special statutory coverage at the behest of 

States and political subdivisions in which the danger of 

substantial voting discrimination has not materialized during 

the preceding five years.”). As of May 9, 2012, having 

demonstrated that they no longer discriminate in voting, 136

jurisdictions and sub-jurisdictions had bailed out, including 30 

counties, 79 towns and cities, 21 school boards, and 6 utility 

or sanitary districts. U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Section 4 of the 

Voting Rights Act, http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/

misc/sec_4.php#bailout_list (last visited May 9, 2012) (“DOJ 

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Bailout List”). In fact, by ruling in Northwest Austin that any

jurisdiction covered by section 5 could seek bailout—a 

development unmentioned by the dissent—the Supreme Court

increased significantly the extent to which bailout helps 

“ensure Congress’ means are proportionate to [its] ends,”

Boerne, 521 U.S. at 533. See Nw. Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 2516 

(holding that “all political subdivisions—not only those 

described in § 14(c)(2)—are eligible to file a bailout suit”). 

Not surprisingly, then, the pace of bailout increased after

Northwest Austin: of the successful bailout actions since 

1965, 30 percent occurred in the three years after the Supreme 

Court issued its decision in 2009. See DOJ Bailout List, 

http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/misc/sec_4.php#bailout_

list. Also, the Attorney General “has a number of active 

bailout investigations, encompassing more than 100 

jurisdictions and subjurisdictions from a range of States.” Br. 

for Att’y Gen. as Appellee at 47–48, LaRoque v. Holder, No. 

11-5349 (D.C. Cir. May 18, 2012).

The importance of this significantly liberalized bailout 

mechanism cannot be overstated. Underlying the debate over 

the continued need for section 5 is a judgment about when 

covered jurisdictions—many with very bad historic records of 

racial discrimination in voting—have changed enough so that 

case-by-case section 2 litigation is adequate to protect the 

right to vote. Bailout embodies Congress’s judgment on this 

question: jurisdictions originally covered because of their 

histories of discrimination can escape section 5 preclearance 

by demonstrating a clean record on voting rights for ten years 

in a row. See 42 U.S.C. § 1973b(a)(1) (bailout criteria). As the 

House Report states, “covered status has been and continues 

to be within the control of the jurisdiction such that those 

jurisdictions that have a genuinely clean record and want to 

terminate coverage have the ability to do so.” H.R. Rep. No. 

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109-478, at 25. Bailout thus helps to ensure that section 5 is 

“sufficiently related to the problem that it targets,” Nw. 

Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 2512.

Shelby County complains that bailout helps only “at the 

margins,” Appellant’s Br. 53; see also Dissenting Op. at 29,

and the dissent emphasizes that only about 1 percent of 

covered jurisdictions and subjurisdictions have applied for 

bailout, Dissenting Op. at 29. But absent evidence that there 

are “clean” jurisdictions that would like to bail out but cannot 

meet the standards, the low bailout rate tells us nothing about 

the effectiveness of the bailout provision. See Shelby Cnty., 

811 F. Supp. 2d at 500–01 (describing “several plausible 

explanations for th[e] failure to seek bailout,” including “the 

minimal administrative cost associated with preclearance, and 

the fact that covered jurisdictions see no need to avoid the 

preclearance requirement”). As the dissent concedes, since 

1982 no bailout application has been denied, Dissenting Op. 

at 29, and Congress considered evidence that the bailout 

criteria “are easily proven for jurisdictions that do not 

discriminate in their voting practices.” Voting Rights Act: An 

Examination of the Scope and Criteria for Coverage Under 

the Special Provisions of the Act: Hearing Before the 

Subcomm. on the Constitution of the H. Comm. on the 

Judiciary, 109th Cong. 90 (2005). The dissent speculates that 

“opaque standards” may prevent bailouts, Dissenting Op. at 

29, but neither it nor Shelby County specifically challenges 

Congress’s definition of what constitutes a clean jurisdiction 

or how the Attorney General is applying the bailout criteria.

In fact, as noted above, Shelby County never even tried to bail 

out and has brought only a facial challenge. If something 

about the bailout criteria themselves or how the Attorney 

General is applying them is preventing jurisdictions with 

clean records from escaping section 5 preclearance, those 

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criteria can be challenged in a separate action brought by any

adversely affected jurisdiction. See United States v. Salerno, 

481 U.S. 739, 745 (1987) (explaining that in a facial 

challenge, “[t]he fact that [a law] might operate 

unconstitutionally under some conceivable set of 

circumstances is insufficient to render it wholly invalid”). 

This, then, brings us to the critical question: Is the 

statute’s “disparate geographic coverage . . . sufficiently 

related to the problem that it targets”? Nw. Austin, 129 S. Ct. 

at 2512. Of course, if the statute produced “a remarkably bad 

fit,” Dissenting Op. at 25, then we would agree that it is no 

longer congruent and proportional. But as explained above, 

although the section 4(b) formula relies on old data, the 

legislative record shows that it, together with the statute’s 

provisions for bail-in and bailout—hardly “tack[ed] on,” id. at 

30 (internal quotation marks omitted), but rather an integral 

part of the coverage mechanism—continues to single out the 

jurisdictions in which discrimination is concentrated. Given 

this, and given the fundamental principle that we may not 

“strik[e] down an Act of Congress except upon a clear 

showing of unconstitutionality,” Salazar v. Buono, 130 S. Ct. 

1803, 1820 (2010) (plurality opinion), we see no principled 

basis for setting aside the district court’s conclusion that 

section 5 is “sufficiently related to the problem that it targets,”

Nw. Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 2512.

C.

We turn, finally, to the dissent’s argument that section 5 

“requires a jurisdiction not only to engage in some level of 

race-conscious decisionmaking, but also on occasion to 

sacrifice principles aimed at depoliticizing redistricting.” 

Dissenting Op. at 4; see also Nw. Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 2512 

(explaining that “federalism concerns are underscored by the 

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argument that . . . ‘considerations of race that would doom a 

redistricting plan under the Fourteenth Amendment or § 2 

seem to be what save it under § 5’ ” and that “[a]dditional 

constitutional concerns are raised in saying that this tension 

between §§ 2 and 5 must persist in covered jurisdictions and 

not elsewhere” (quoting Georgia v. Ashcroft, 539 U.S. at 491 

(Kennedy, J., concurring))). According to the dissent, this 

concern and the burden imposed by section 5 are aggravated

by the amendments to section 5 Congress added in 

conjunction with the 2006 reauthorization. Dissenting Op. at 

5–7; see also 2006 Act § 5. 

The dissent’s thoughtful arguments face a serious 

obstacle. Shelby County neither challenges the 

constitutionality of the 2006 amendments or even argues that 

they increase section 5’s burdens, nor does it argue that 

section 5 requires covered jurisdictions to undertake 

impermissible considerations of race. These issues, in other 

words, are entirely unbriefed, and as we have repeatedly made 

clear, “appellate courts do not sit as self-directed boards of 

legal inquiry and research, but essentially as arbiters of legal 

questions presented and argued by the parties before them.” 

Carducci v. Regan, 714 F.2d 171, 177 (D.C. Cir. 1983). 

Where, as here, “counsel has made no attempt to address the 

issue, we will not remedy the defect, especially where, as 

here, important questions of far-reaching significance are 

involved.” Id. (internal quotation marks omitted).

Even were they not forfeited, the dissent’s concerns 

would not have satisfied the standards for mounting a facial

constitutional challenge. Such a challenge, the Supreme Court 

has made clear, is “the most difficult . . . to mount 

successfully, since the challenger must establish that no set of 

circumstances exists under which the Act would be valid.” 

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Salerno, 481 U.S. at 745. Yet the amendments, as well as the 

Supreme Court’s concern that section 5 may sometimes 

require otherwise impermissible race-conscious 

decisionmaking, are implicated only in a subset of cases. 

Specifically, the amendment overturning Bossier II is 

implicated only in cases involving a discriminatory but nonretrogressive purpose, see 42 U.S.C. § 1973c(c); the 

amendments overturning Georgia v. Ashcroft, like the 

Supreme Court’s concern about race-conscious 

decisionmaking, are implicated primarily in redistricting cases

where section 5 seems to require consideration of race as a 

“ ‘predominant factor.’ ” See Nw. Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 2512 

(quoting Georgia v. Ashcroft, 539 U.S. at 491 (Kennedy, J., 

concurring)); 42 U.S.C. § 1973c(b), (d). In other words, even 

assuming the dissent is correct, it would not have established 

that “no set of circumstances exists under which the Act 

would be valid,” Salerno, 481 U.S. at 745. Indeed, addressing 

the dissent’s arguments would lead us into the very kind of 

“speculation” and “anticipat[ion]” of constitutional questions

that require courts to “disfavor[]” facial challenges. Wash. 

State Grange v. Wash. State Republican Party, 552 U.S. 442, 

450 (2008) (internal quotation marks omitted).

IV.

In Northwest Austin, the Supreme Court signaled that the 

extraordinary federalism costs imposed by section 5 raise 

substantial constitutional concerns. As a lower federal court 

urged to strike this duly enacted law of Congress, we must 

proceed with great caution, bound as we are by Supreme 

Court precedent and confined as we must be to resolve only 

the precise legal question before us: Does the severe remedy 

of preclearance remain “congruent and proportional”? The 

legislative record is by no means unambiguous. But Congress 

drew reasonable conclusions from the extensive evidence it 

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gathered and acted pursuant to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth 

Amendments, which entrust Congress with ensuring that the 

right to vote—surely among the most important guarantees of 

political liberty in the Constitution—is not abridged on 

account of race. In this context, we owe much deference to 

the considered judgment of the People’s elected 

representatives. We affirm.

So ordered.

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WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge, dissenting: Section 5 of 

the Voting Rights Act imposes rather extraordinary burdens 

on “covered” jurisdictions—nine states (and every jurisdiction 

therein), plus a host of jurisdictions scattered through several 

other states. See Voting Section, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, 

Section 5 Covered Jurisdictions, http://www.justice.gov/crt/ab

out/vot/sec_5/covered.php (last visited May 9, 2012) (listing 

the covered jurisdictions). Unless and until released from 

coverage (a process discussed below), each of these 

jurisdictions must seek the Justice Department’s approval for 

every contemplated change in election procedures, however 

trivial. See 42 U.S.C. § 1973c. Alternatively, it can seek 

approval from a three-judge district court in the District of 

Columbia. See id. Below I’ll address the criteria by which 

the Department and courts assess these proposals; for now, 

suffice it to say that the act not only switches the burden of 

proof to the supplicant jurisdiction, but also applies 

substantive standards quite different from those governing the 

rest of the nation. 

 Section 4(b) of the act states two criteria by which 

jurisdictions are chosen for this special treatment: whether a 

jurisdiction had (1) a “test or device” restricting the 

opportunity to register or vote and (2) a voter registration or 

turnout rate below 50%. See 42 U.S.C. § 1973b(b). But 

§ 4(b) specifies that the elections for which these two criteria 

are measured must be ones that took place several decades 

ago. The freshest, most recent data relate to conditions in 

November 1972—34 years before Congress extended the act 

for another 25 years (and thus 59 years before the extension’s 

scheduled expiration). See id. The oldest data—and a 

jurisdiction included because of the oldest data is every bit as 

covered as one condemned under the newest—are another 

eight years older. See id. 

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2

 Of course sometimes a skilled dart-thrower can hit the 

bull’s eye throwing a dart backwards over his shoulder. As I 

will try to show below, Congress hasn’t proven so adept. 

Whether the criteria are viewed in absolute terms (are they 

adequate in themselves to justify the extraordinary burdens of 

§ 5?) or in relative ones (do they draw a rational line between 

covered and uncovered jurisdictions?), they seem to me 

defective. They are not, in my view, “congruent and 

proportional,” as required by controlling Supreme Court 

precedent. My colleagues find they are. I dissent. 

* * * 

Although it is only the irrational coverage formula of 

§ 4(b) that I find unconstitutional, it is impossible to assess 

that formula without first looking at the burdens § 5 imposes 

on covered jurisdictions. Any answer to the question whether 

§ 4(b) is “sufficiently related to the problem it targets,” 

Northwest Austin Municipal Utility Dist. No. One v. Holder, 

129 S. Ct. 2504, 2512 (2009), that is, whether it is “congruent 

and proportional,” must be informed by the consequences 

triggered by § 4(b). (I agree with the majority that Northwest 

Austin “send[s] a powerful signal that congruence and 

proportionality is the appropriate standard of review.” Maj. 

Op. at 16.)1

 The greater the burdens imposed by § 5, the more 

 1

 Given such a standard, I cannot understand how we could 

apply Salerno’s “no set of circumstances” test, see Maj. Op. at 61-

62, quite apart from the test’s questionable continued vitality, see, 

e.g., Washington State Grange v. Washington State Republican 

Party, 552 U.S. 442, 449 (2008). Suppose Congress had actually 

designed the coverage formula by having the chair of the Senate 

Judiciary Committee throw darts at a map and had included every 

jurisdiction where a dart landed. Would we be expected to reject a 

facial challenge simply on a showing that the behavior of one

covered jurisdiction was so blatantly unconstitutional as to cry out 

for application of § 5? 

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accurate the coverage scheme must be. If, for example, § 5 

merely required covered jurisdictions to notify the Justice 

Department of an impending change in voting procedures, 

without giving the Department power to delay or thwart 

implementation, even a rather loose coverage formula would 

likely appear proportional. 

 But § 5 requires much more than notice. For covered 

jurisdictions, it mandates anticipatory review of state 

legislative or administrative acts, requiring state and local 

officials to go hat in hand to Justice Department officialdom 

to seek approval of any and all proposed voting changes. See 

42 U.S.C. § 1973c(a). Since its inception, even supporters of 

the Voting Rights Act have recognized that the preclearance 

regime was particularly “strong medicine” for a particularly 

extreme problem. Voting Rights Act: Hearings on H.R. 6400 

Before Subcomm. No. 5 of the House Comm. on the Judiciary, 

89th Cong. 110 (1965) (statement of Rep. Chelf). When it 

first upheld the VRA, the Supreme Court recognized it as a 

“complex scheme of stringent remedies” and § 5 in particular 

as an “uncommon exercise of congressional power.” South 

Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 315, 334 (1966). And 

only a few years ago the Supreme Court reminded us that the 

federalism costs of § 5 are “substantial.” Northwest Austin, 

129 S. Ct. at 2511. 

A critical aspect of those costs is the shifted burden of 

proof (a matter I’ll discuss below in the realm of its most 

significant application). So too is the section’s broad sweep: 

§ 5 applies to any voting change proposed by a covered 

jurisdiction, without regard to kind or magnitude, and thus 

governs many laws that likely could never “deny or abridge” a 

“minority group’s opportunity to vote.” See 42 U.S.C. 

§ 1973c(a); Allen v. State Bd. of Elections, 393 U.S. 544, 566 

(1969) (“The legislative history on the whole supports the 

view that Congress intended to reach any state enactment, 

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which altered the election law of a covered State in even a 

minor way.”). This obvious point is underscored by the 

miniscule and declining share of covered jurisdictions’ 

applications that draw Justice Department objections—with 

only five objections for every ten thousand submissions 

between 1998 and 2002. See Richard L. Hasen, 

Congressional Power to Renew the Preclearance Provisions 

of the Voting Rights Act After Tennessee v. Lane, 192 OHIO 

ST. L.J. 177, 192 & fig.3 (2005) (noting that the Department’s 

objection rate has “been falling steadily” ever since the early 

years of the VRA and equaled 0.05% between 1998 and 

2002). In the vast majority of cases, then, the overall effect of 

§ 5 is merely to delay implementation of a perfectly proper 

law. 

Of course the most critical features of § 5 are the 

substantive standards it applies to the covered jurisdictions. 

Whether a proposed voting change can be precleared turns on 

whether it would have a retrogressive effect on minority 

voters. See Beer v. United States, 425 U.S. 130, 141 (1976). 

In practice this standard requires a jurisdiction not only to 

engage in some level of race-conscious decisionmaking, but 

also on occasion to sacrifice principles aimed at depoliticizing 

redistricting. Suppose a covered jurisdiction sought to 

implement what we may loosely call “good government” 

principles. It might, for example, delegate the task of 

redistricting to a computer programmed to apply criteria such 

as compactness, contiguity, conformity to existing political 

boundaries, and satisfaction of one person, one vote 

requirements. Despite these worthy goals, the resulting plan, 

if it happened to reduce the number of majority-minority 

districts, would fail preclearance, as the government 

acknowledged at oral argument. See Tr. of Oral Arg. at 37-

38. As Justice Kennedy cautioned in Georgia v. Ashcroft, 539 

U.S. 461 (2003), “[C]onsiderations of race that would doom a 

redistricting plan under the Fourteenth Amendment . . . seem 

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to be what save it under § 5.” Id. at 491 (Kennedy, J., 

concurring); see also Miller v. Johnson, 515 U.S. 900, 927 

(1995) (noting that Justice Department’s “implicit command 

that States engage in presumptively unconstitutional racebased districting brings the Act . . . into tension with the 

Fourteenth Amendment”). 

Unfortunately, when Congress passed the 2006 version of 

the VRA, it not only disregarded but flouted Justice 

Kennedy’s concern. New subsections (b) and (d) were added 

to § 5 to overturn Georgia v. Ashcroft, thereby restricting the 

flexibility of states to experiment with different methods of 

maintaining (and perhaps even expanding) minority influence. 

The Georgia Court had prescribed a holistic approach to § 5, 

instructing courts confronting a proposed voting change “not 

[to] focus solely on the comparative ability of a minority 

group to elect a candidate of its choice,”2

 539 U.S. at 480 

(majority opinion), but also to consider the “extent to which a 

new plan changes the minority group’s opportunity to 

participate in the political process” writ large, id. at 482. 

Georgia thus gave covered jurisdictions an opportunity to 

make trade-offs between concentrating minority voters in 

increasingly safe districts and spreading some of those voters 

out into additional districts; the latter choice, the Court 

pointed out, might increase the “substantive representation” 

they enjoy and lessen the risks of “isolating minority voters 

from the rest of the State” and of “narrowing [their] political 

influence to only a fraction of political districts.” Id. at 481; 

see also Samuel Issacharoff, Is Section 5 of the Voting Rights 

 2

 The discourse revolving around § 5 invariably assumes that 

members of a minority have virtually identical interests and 

preferences. I follow that pattern here, reserving for the end of the 

opinion consideration of how such an assumption relates to the real 

world and to the 15th Amendment. 

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Act a Victim of Its Own Success?, 104 COLUM. L. REV. 1710, 

1729 (2004) (expressing concern that § 5’s “narrow focus on 

securing the electability of minority candidates could 

compromise the range of political accords available to 

minority voters and thereby, under conditions of mature 

political engagement, actually thwart minority political 

gains”); David Epstein & Sharyn O’Halloran, Measuring the 

Electoral and Policy Impact of Majority-Minority Voting 

Districts, 43 AM. J. POL. SCI. 367, 390-92 (1999) (noting that 

overreliance on majority-minority districts means that 

“moderate senators will likely be replaced by extremists,” 

undermining the ability to create “biracial coalitions [which] 

are a key to passing racially progressive policies”). In so 

doing, the Court recognized that a minority group might in 

fact “achieve greater overall representation . . . by increasing 

the number of representatives sympathetic to the interests of 

minority voters,” rather than merely by electing the maximum 

possible number of representatives dependent on securing a 

majority of minority votes. 539 U.S. at 483. 

As amended, the act forecloses this choice. Preclearance 

now has an exclusive focus—whether the plan diminishes the 

ability of minorities (always assumed to be a monolith) to 

“elect their preferred candidates of choice,” irrespective of 

whether policymakers (including minority ones) decide that a 

group’s long-term interests might be better served by less 

concentration—and thus less of the political isolation that 

concentration spawns. See 42 U.S.C. § 1973c(b); id. 

§ 1973c(d); see also Texas v. United States, -- F. Supp. 2d --, 

2011 WL 6440006, at *4 (D.D.C. Dec. 22, 2011) (interpreting 

the amended law to overturn Georgia). The amended § 5 thus 

not only mandates race-conscious decisionmaking, but a 

particular brand of it. In doing so, the new § 5 aggravates 

both the federal-state tension with which Northwest Austin 

was concerned and the tension between § 5 and the 

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Reconstruction Amendments’ commitment to 

nondiscrimination. 

Another 2006 amendment makes the § 5 burden even 

heavier. Section 5 prohibits preclearance of laws that have the 

“purpose” of “denying or abridging the right to vote on 

account of race or color.” 42 U.S.C. § 1973c(a). The Court 

had interpreted “purpose” to be consistent with § 5’s effects 

prong, so that the term justified denying preclearance only to 

changes with a “retrogressive” purpose, rather than changes 

with either that or a discriminatory purpose. See Reno v. 

Bossier Parish School Bd., 528 U.S. 320, 341 (2000) 

(“Bossier II”). The 2006 amendments reversed that decision, 

specifying that “purpose” encompassed “any discriminatory 

purpose.” 42 U.S.C. § 1973c(c) (emphasis added). This 

broadening of the § 5 criteria may seem unexceptionable, but 

the Court had previously found that assigning covered 

jurisdictions the burden of proving the absence of 

discriminatory purpose was precisely the device that the 

Department had employed in its pursuit of maximizing 

majority-minority districts at any cost: “The key to the 

Government’s position, which is plain from its objection 

letters if not from its briefs to this court . . . , is and always has 

been that Georgia failed to proffer a nondiscriminatory 

purpose for its refusal in the first two submissions to take the 

steps necessary to create [an additional] majority-minority 

district.” Miller, 515 U.S. at 924. By inserting discriminatory 

purpose into § 5, and requiring covered jurisdictions 

affirmatively to prove its absence, Congress appears to have, 

at worst, restored “the Justice Department’s implicit command 

that States engage in presumptively unconstitutional racebased districting,” id. at 927, and at best, “exacerbate[d] the 

substantial federalism costs that the preclearance procedure 

already exacts,” Bossier II, 528 U.S. at 336. 

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The majority correctly notes that Shelby did not argue 

that either of these amendments is unconstitutional. See Maj. 

Op. at 61. Neither do I. Appellant does argue however that 

§ 4(b) is unconstitutional, that is, that § 4(b) is not a congruent 

and proportional response to the problem currently posed by 

voting discrimination. To answer that question one must 

necessarily first assess the severity of the consequences of 

coverage under § 4(b) (i.e., subjection to § 5 as it exists 

today). See supra at p. 2. 

Whether Congress is free to impose § 5 on a select set of 

jurisdictions also depends in part, of course, on possible 

shortcomings in the remedy that § 2 provides for the country 

as a whole. That section creates a right to sue any jurisdiction 

to stop voting practices that “result[] in a denial or 

abridgement” of the right to vote “on account of race or 

color.” 42 U.S.C. § 1973(a). Doubtless the section is less 

drastic a remedy than § 5 (and thus by some criteria less 

effective). But it is easy to overstate the inadequacies of § 2, 

such as cost and the consequences of delay. Compare Maj. 

Op. at 41-42. Unlike in most litigation, plaintiffs’ costs for 

§ 2 suits can in effect be assumed by the Department of 

Justice by its either exercising its authority to bring suit itself, 

see, e.g., United States v. Blaine County, 363 F.3d 897 (9th 

Cir. 2004), or by intervening in support of the plaintiff, as it 

often does. See, e.g., Brown v. Bd. of School Comm’rs, 706 

F.2d 1103, 1107 (11th Cir. 1983). So far as Departmental 

resource constraints are concerned, narrowing § 5’s reach 

would, as a matter of simple arithmetic, enable it to increase 

§ 2 enforcement with whatever resources it stopped spending 

on § 5. For those cases where the Justice Department still 

fails to intervene, § 2 provides for reimbursement of attorney 

and expert fees for prevailing parties. See 42 U.S.C. 

§ 1973l(e). Finally, as to the risk that discriminatory practices 

may take hold before traditional litigation has run its course, 

courts may as always use the standard remedy of a 

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preliminary injunction to prevent irreparable harm caused by 

adjudicative delay. See Perry v. Perez, 132 S. Ct. 934, 942 

(2012). 

Indeed, the ubiquitous availability of § 2 is of course a 

reminder that § 5 was created for the specific purpose of 

overcoming state and local resistance to federal antidiscrimination policy. When the Supreme Court first upheld 

the act in 1966, it found that § 5 was necessary because “caseby-case litigation,” now governed by § 2, was “inadequate to 

combat the widespread and persistent discrimination in 

voting.” Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 328. While § 2 was tailored 

to redress actual instances of discrimination, § 5 was crafted 

to overcome a “century of systematic resistance to the 

Fifteenth Amendment” and ongoing “obstructionist tactics.” 

Id. 

But life in the covered jurisdictions has not congealed in 

the 48 years since the first triggering election (or the 40 years 

since the most recent). “[C]urrent burdens . . . must be 

justified by current needs,” Northwest Austin, 129 S. Ct. at 

2512, and the burden imposed by § 5 has only grown heavier 

in those same years. 

In order for § 4(b) to be congruent and proportional then, 

the disparity in current evidence of discrimination between the 

covered and uncovered jurisdictions must be proportionate to 

the severe differential in treatment imposed by § 5. Put 

another way, a distinct gap must exist between the current 

levels of discrimination in the covered and uncovered 

jurisdictions in order to justify subjecting the former group to 

§ 5’s harsh remedy, even if one might find § 5 appropriate for 

a subset of that group. 

* * * 

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 I now turn to assessing the evidence used to justify the 

§ 4(b) coverage formula. The parties have offered no 

sophisticated statistical analysis of voting discrimination in 

the covered and uncovered jurisdictions, and what follows 

does not purport to fill the sophistication gap. 

The data considered are drawn from the evidence the 

parties have cited, as well as the more general set compiled by 

Congress, especially data the Supreme Court has previously 

found important. For instance, when it upheld the 

preclearance regime in 1980, the Supreme Court noted both 

the “significant disparity” that still existed between AfricanAmerican and white voter registration rates, and the fact that 

the number of black elected officials in covered jurisdictions 

“fell far short of being representative” of the number of 

African-Americans residing in covered jurisdictions. City of 

Rome v. United States, 446 U.S. 156, 180-81 (1980). Beyond 

voter registration and black elected officials, the parties point 

us to comparative, state-by-state data detailing the number of 

federal observers sent into states to oversee elections, plus the 

number of successful § 2 lawsuits. I take each of these in 

turn. 

Voter Registration and Turnout

 Section 4(b)’s coverage formula is keyed to two 

indicators of voter access: voter turnout and the use of tests 

and devices in voter registration. See 42 U.S.C. § 1973b(b). 

In 1966 the Supreme Court characterized the VRA as 

“specifically designed” to remedy the “misuse of tests and 

devices” that characterized the “widespread and persistent 

discrimination” at the time. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 331. 

Section 5 was thus meant, at the very least, to ensure that 

members of minority groups had equal access to the voting 

booth. 

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 Figures I and II3

 focus on this central problem. The two 

charts compare white and black registration and turnout rates 

in the 2004 election, using state-by-state estimates from the 

U.S. Census Bureau. See U.S. Census Bureau, Reported 

Voting and Registration of the Total Voting-Age Population, 

at tbl.4a, available at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/socde

mo/voting/publications/p20/2004/tables.html. Each chart 

takes the number of non-Hispanic whites who registered or 

turned out as a proportion of the total citizen voting-age 

population (“CVAP”) and compares that ratio to the same 

ratio for the black population, i.e., it displays the ratio of these 

two ratios for each state. Thus the greater the ratio (and the 

further to the left on the chart), the greater the racial disparity. 

The chart excludes states where the Census Bureau was 

unable to make reliable estimates of black registration and 

turnout rates (presumably because the black population was 

too small to get a sufficient sample).4

 

 3

 All the charts exclude Michigan and New Hampshire, both 

partially covered states, because the few small townships covered 

constitute only a minute portion of those states and, as far as I can 

tell, have never been the subject of a § 5 action. 

4

 The only covered jurisdictions excluded are Alaska, New 

Hampshire, and South Dakota. Of those, only Alaska is a fully 

covered state. The other states excluded for want of data are 

Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, New 

Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, 

West Virginia, and Wyoming. 

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There appears to be no positive correlation between 

inclusion in § 4(b)’s coverage formula and low black 

registration or turnout. Quite the opposite. To the extent that 

any correlation exists, it appears to be negative—

condemnation under § 4(b) is a marker of higher black 

registration and turnout. Most of the worst offenders—states 

where in 2004 whites turned out or were registered in 

significantly higher proportion than African-Americans—are 

not covered. These include, for example, the three worst—

Massachusetts, Washington, and Colorado. And in Alabama 

and Mississippi, often thought of as two of the worst 

offenders, African-Americans turned out in greater proportion 

than whites. 

Black Elected Officials

 The other metric that the Rome Court considered was the 

number of black elected officials. Figure III uses U.S. Census 

Bureau data from 2000 and a state-by-state breakdown of such 

officials from that same year and displays the number of 

African-Americans who had been elected to office as a 

proportion of their share of the total CVAP in a given state. 

See David A Bostis, Joint Ctr. for Pol. & Econ. Studies, Black 

Elected Officials: A Statistical Summary 2000, available at 

http://www.jointcenter.org/research/black-elected-officials-astatistical-summary-2000; U.S. Census Bureau, Voting-Age 

Population and Voting-Age Citizens, at tbls.1-1 & 1-3, 

available at http://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000

/briefs/phc-t31/index.html. Thus, the higher the percentage 

(and accordingly the further to the right on the chart), the 

closer African-Americans’ share of elected positions is to 

equaling their share of the CVAP. States where the AfricanAmerican share of CVAP was less than 3% are excluded. 

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Again the results are the inverse of § 4(b)’s 

presuppositions. Covered jurisdictions have far more black 

officeholders as a proportion of the black population than do 

uncovered ones. Of the ten states with the highest proportion 

of black elected officials relative to population, eight are 

covered states, with the top five all being fully covered states 

(Virginia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Mississippi, and 

Alabama). Nor can the poor scores achieved by some 

uncovered states be chalked up to small black populations. 

Illinois, Missouri, Delaware and Michigan, where AfricanAmericans comprise at least 10% of the CVAP, all fall to the 

left (i.e., on the worse side) of every one of the states fully 

covered by § 4(b). While the relatively high number of black 

officeholders in covered states might be taken as a testament 

to § 5’s past success, no one could credibly argue that the 

numbers are proof of the coverage scheme’s continued 

rationality. 

In upholding § 5, the district court acknowledged that the 

number of black elected officials had increased but found the 

nature of the positions insufficient, pointing particularly to the 

nationwide disparity between the black proportion of the 

population (11.9%) and the number of black officials elected 

to statewide office (5%). Shelby County v. Holder, 811 F. 

Supp. 2d 424, 468-69 (D.D.C. 2011). It is unclear how this 

supports singling out the covered jurisdictions. Of the 35 

black officials holding statewide elective office in the whole 

country in 2000 (including 2 from the U.S. Virgin Islands), 

nearly a third (11) came from fully covered states, Bostis, 

supra, at 24 tbl.7A, a proportion roughly equivalent to these 

jurisdictions’ share of the nation’s African-American citizen 

voting-age population (about 33%), see U.S. Census Bureau, 

Voting-Age Population and Voting-Age Citizens, supra, at 

tbl.1-3. Of course one might expect that the higher average 

African-American share of the population in the covered 

states would lead to a higher share of statewide elected 

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officials. But if on that account one thinks there has been a 

shortfall in the covered states, it might be caused in part by the 

Justice Department’s policy of maximizing majority-minority 

districts, with the concomitant risks of “isolating minority 

voters from the rest of the State” and “narrowing [their] 

political influence to only a fraction of political districts.” 

Georgia v. Ashcroft, 539 U.S. 461, 481 (2003). If AfricanAmerican candidates primarily face solidly African-American 

constituencies, and thus develop political personas pitched 

overwhelmingly to the Democratic side of the aisle, it would 

hardly be surprising that they might face special obstacles 

seeking statewide office (assuming, of course, raciallypolarized voting, as § 5 does). See Epstein, supra, at 390-92.

Federal Observers

Section 8 of the VRA authorizes the Department to send 

federal observers to covered jurisdictions in order to enter 

polling places and monitor elections if “necessary to enforce 

the guarantees of the 14th or 15th amendment.” 42 U.S.C. 

§ 1973f(a)(2)(B). Additionally, § 3(a) permits a court to 

authorize the appointment of federal observers in any political 

subdivision, whether covered or uncovered, if the court finds 

it “appropriate to enforce the voting guarantees of the 

fourteenth or fifteenth amendment.” Id. § 1973a(a); see also 

id. § 1973f(a)(1). In an extensive report, the National 

Commission on the Voting Rights Act mapped the number of 

occasions these observers had been assigned to states in the 

22-year period between the prior VRA authorization (1982) 

and the 2004 election. See Nat’l Comm’n on the Voting 

Rights Act, Protecting Minority Voters: The Voting Rights Act 

at Work 1982-2005, at 61 & Map 10B (Feb. 2006) (“Nat’l 

Comm’n Report”). Figure IV shows the state-by-state 

distribution of observer coverages per million minority 

residents, where the minority population is calculated by 

subtracting the non-Hispanic white population from the total 

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2004 population, as estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau. 

See U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Estimates of the Population 

for Race Alone and Hispanic or Latino Origin for the United 

States and States: July 1, 2004, available at http://www.censu

s.gov/popest/data/historical/2000s/vintage_2004/state.html. 

Superficially, Figure IV supports § 4(b), indicating that 

observers are being sent to covered states more often than to 

uncovered ones. Six of the “worst” eight states are covered 

ones. But a number of factors undermine any serious 

inference. First, the National Commission report explains that 

it has captured “each occasion when federal observers are 

detailed to a jurisdiction covered by Section 5 or Section 203.” 

Nat’l Comm’n Report at 60 (emphasis added). The apparent 

implication is that the Commission didn’t purport to collect 

data for jurisdictions not covered by either of those sections; if 

so, the data are useless for comparative purposes. Indeed, 

testimony before Congress suggests that the Civil Rights 

Division simply doesn’t use “observers” for uncovered states, 

preferring instead to send its own staff lawyers to monitor 

elections “[i]n areas of the country where Federal observers 

cannot be sent” (presumably meaning, “cannot be sent without 

the necessity and deterrent of getting court approval”). Voting 

Rights Act: Sections 6 and 8—The Federal Examiner and 

Observer Program: Hearing Before the Subcomm. on the 

Constitution of the Comm. on the Judiciary, 109th Cong. 196 

(2005) (statement of Bernard Schlozman). In fact, when 

calling this to Congress’s attention, a Department official 

noted that the “the great bulk of . . . recent enforcement cases 

since, say 1993, have involved jurisdictions (e.g., 

Massachusetts, California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, 

Washington, and Pennsylvania) where there is no statutory 

authority to send Federal observers.” Id. 

 

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Even if we were to assume the National Commission’s 

figures to be complete, and thus that every federal observer 

between 1982 and 2004 was sent to a jurisdiction already 

covered under some part of the VRA (either § 5 or § 203), this 

suggests another limitation on the data’s relevance: The same 

Department that administers § 5 preclearance also decides 

where to send observers, so it is unsurprising that the covered 

states, which are already in the Department’s sights, would 

also receive the most observers. Finally, § 3 forces the Justice 

Department to go to court for authorization to assign 

observers to uncovered areas, while § 8 imposes no such 

hurdle for the covered ones, undermining further the data’s 

already questionable value. 

Successful Section 2 Lawsuits 

The final metric for which comparative data exist is 

reported, successful § 2 lawsuits. Appellees point us to a 

comprehensive list of reported, post-1982 § 2 cases compiled 

by Professor Ellen Katz and the Voting Rights Initiative at the 

University of Michigan Law School. See Ellen Katz & The 

Voting Rights Initiative, VRI Database Master List (2006) 

(“Katz Master List”), available at http://sitemaker.umich.edu/

votingrights/files/masterlist.xls. Relying on these data, the 

district court noted that more than 56% of successful § 2 suits 

from 1982 to 2006 have been filed in covered jurisdictions, 

although those jurisdictions comprise only a quarter of the 

nation’s population. See Shelby County, 811 F. Supp. 2d at 

506. 

But the persuasive power of this statistic dissolves when 

we disaggregate the data by state. Figure V looks at each 

state’s number of successful § 2 lawsuits between 1982 and 

2005, per million residents, using the same 2004 U.S. Census 

Bureau population estimates used above. Because Professor 

Katz’s database helpfully informs us whether each lawsuit 

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21

was located in a covered or uncovered jurisdiction, it is 

possible to break out the covered portions of partially covered 

states from the uncovered portions:5 A “(C)” below the 

state’s abbreviation indicates that the data pertain only to the 

covered portion of that state, and an “(NC)” indicates the 

opposite. Because one successful case in a covered portion of 

South Dakota in 24 years produced a ratio of 43 cases for 

every hypothetical million residents, the covered portions of 

South Dakota are excluded in order to avoid distorting the 

chart’s scale. 

 5

 In order to separately calculate the populations of the covered 

portions of partially covered states (namely, New York, California, 

North Carolina, and Florida), Chart V uses the county-specific 

population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. See U.S. 

Census Bureau, Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for 

Counties: April 1, 2000 to July 1 2004, http://www.census.gov/pope

st/data/counties/totals/2004/CO-EST2004-01.html (linking to 

county-specific data for these states and others); Voting Section, 

U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Section 5 Covered Jurisdictions, 

http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/sec_5/covered.php (last visited 

May 9, 2012). 

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Like the federal observer data discussed above, Figure V 

suggests that a more narrowly tailored coverage formula—

capturing only Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, and 

possibly the covered portions of South Dakota and North 

Carolina—might be defensible. But beyond these, the 

covered jurisdictions appear indistinguishable from their 

uncovered peers. The five worst uncovered jurisdictions, 

including at least two quite populous states (Illinois and 

Arkansas), have worse records than eight of the covered 

jurisdictions: the six covered states appearing to the right, plus 

two fully covered states—Arizona and Alaska—which do not 

appear on the chart at all because there has been not one

successful § 2 suit in those states in the whole 24-year period. 

Of the ten jurisdictions with the greatest number of successful 

§ 2 lawsuits, only four are covered (five if we add back in the 

covered portion of South Dakota). A formula with an error 

rate of 50% or more does not seem “congruent and 

proportional.” 

To bolster these numbers, the majority relies on an 

account of purportedly successful, but unreported § 2 cases, 

numbers that it rightly notes one should “approach . . . with 

caution.” Maj. Op. at 50. Indeed, beyond the serious 

concerns about these data already elucidated by the majority 

(e.g., completely different groups gathered the data regarding 

covered and uncovered jurisdictions), we also have almost no 

information for how Mr. McCrary and his staff identified 

particular cases as “successful” or not. All we know is that he 

required “some evidence” that the case was “resolved” under 

§ 2 and “some reference” to settlement. Joint Appendix 95. 

And the inference of “success” from evidence of possible 

settlements seems exceptionally weak, for both the unreported 

cases in the covered jurisdictions compiled by the National 

Commission and those from the uncovered jurisdictions 

compiled by Mr. McCrary. It overlooks not only the range of 

outcomes embraced in the concept of settlement but also the 

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24

strategic factors, including legal fees and reputational risk, 

that go into a jurisdiction’s decision to settle. 

Additionally, defenders of the coverage scheme point to 

two circumstances that might also artificially reduce § 2 

figures for the covered states, namely the “blocking” effect of 

actual § 5 vetoes, and the deterrent effect of jurisdictions’ 

having to seek preclearance. As to blocking, there seems little 

basis to infer that many of the 626 objections spread over 24 

years were substitutes for successful § 2 suits. Any such 

inference is undermined by the Department’s ability to almost 

costlessly “Just Say No,” the allocation of the burden of proof 

to the jurisdiction, the legal fees that fighting the Department 

will entail, and the difference in the substantive standards 

governing § 2 and § 5 proceedings. 

As to the imputed deterrence, it is plainly unquantifiable. 

If we assume that it has played a role, how much should we 

inflate the covered states’ figures to account for it, and which 

covered states? Given much weight, the supposed deterrent 

effect would justify continued VRA renewals out to the crack 

of doom. Indeed, Northwest Austin’s insistence that “current 

burdens . . . must be justified by current needs,” 129 S. Ct. at 

2512, would mean little if § 5’s supposed deterrent effect were 

enough to justify the current scheme. See Tr. of Oral Arg. at 

28, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility Dist. No. One v. 

Holder, 129 S. Ct. 2504 (2009) (No. 08-322) (statement of 

Chief Justice Roberts) (“Well, that’s like the old—you know, 

it’s the elephant whistle. You know, I have this whistle to 

keep away the elephants. . . . Well, there are no elephants, so 

it must work.”). 

* * * 

To recap, of the four metrics for which comparative data 

exist, one (voter registration and turnout) suggests that the 

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coverage formula completely lacks any rational connection to 

current levels of voter discrimination, another (black elected 

officials), at best does nothing to combat that suspicion, and, 

at worst, confirms it, and two final metrics (federal observers 

and § 2 suits) indicate that the formula, though not completely 

perverse, is a remarkably bad fit with Congress’s concerns. 

Given the drastic remedy imposed on covered jurisdictions by 

§ 5, as described above, I do not believe that such equivocal 

evidence can sustain the scheme. 

The Supreme Court’s initial review of the formula in 

1966 provides a model for evaluating such an imperfect 

correlation. It assessed the evidence of discrimination before 

it and divided the covered jurisdictions into three categories: 

(1) a group for which “federal courts have repeatedly found 

substantial voting discrimination”; (2) another group “for 

which there was more fragmentary evidence of recent voting 

discrimination”; and (3) a third set consisting of the “few 

remaining States and political subdivisions covered by the 

formula,” for which there was little or no such evidence of 

discrimination, but whose use of voting tests and low voter 

turnout warranted inclusion, “at least in the absence of proof 

that they have been free of substantial voting discrimination in 

recent years.” Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 329-30. In that 

original review, the Supreme Court placed three states 

(Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) in category one, 

another three (Georgia, South Carolina, and the covered 

portions of North Carolina) in category two, and finally two 

fully covered states (Virginia and Alaska) plus a few counties 

in Hawaii, Idaho, and Arizona, in category three. 

The evidence adduced above yields a far worse fit than 

the data reviewed in Katzenbach. Indeed, one would be hardpressed to put any of the covered jurisdictions into 

Katzenbach’s first category. Based on any of the comparative 

data available to us, and particularly those metrics relied on in 

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Rome, it can hardly be argued that there is evidence of a 

“substantial” amount of voting discrimination in any of the 

covered states, and certainly not at levels anywhere 

comparable to those the Court faced in Katzenbach. In terms 

of successful § 2 law suits, only three covered states—

Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama—plus uncovered 

Montana—have more than two successful suits per million 

residents over the past quarter-century (excluding of course 

the covered portion of South Dakota, which scores high only 

because with such a small population the one suit there 

produces a high ratio per hypothetical million); in fact, these 

three states are the only ones with more than 10 successful 

suits in the 24 years between 1982 and 2006.6 See Katz 

Master List. And of course, even this number may be 

artificially large since a successful § 2 suit does not 

necessarily entail a finding of unconstitutional behavior (i.e., 

intentionally discriminatory acts); indeed, the Katz Study 

itself reports only 12 findings of intentional discrimination in 

the covered jurisdictions over the same two-and-a-half 

decades, and on my reading of the cases Professor Katz lists, 

there are even fewer. See, e.g., Brown v. Bd. of School 

Comm’rs, 706 F.2d 1103, 1107 (11th Cir. 1983) (listed in both 

the Senate and Katz reports as a case finding discriminatory 

intent, but the case finds such intent only as to an electoral 

system enacted in 1876). 

Even assuming that these small numbers would qualify as 

“fragmentary evidence” adequate to place those three in 

Katzenbach’s second category, that leaves six fully covered 

states (plus several jurisdictions in partially covered states) in 

category three, many more than in 1966, when only two fully 

 6

 I exclude North Carolina here because four of its ten 

successful suits were located in uncovered portions of the state. See 

Katz Master List. 

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covered states (Virginia and Alaska) were not included in 

either category one or two. See Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 318, 

329-30. A coverage scheme that allows two or three of the 

worst offenders to drag down other covered jurisdictions, 

whose continued inclusion is merely a combination of 

historical artifact and Congress’s disinclination to update the 

formula, can hardly be thought “congruent and proportional.” 

See Nathaniel Persily, The Promise and Pitfalls of the New 

Voting Rights Act, 117 YALE L.J. 174, 208-09 (2007) 

(concluding that any “debate over the coverage formula” 

would “likely have led to the complete unraveling” of the 

VRA’s 2006 reauthorization campaign); id. at 208 (“The most 

one can say in defense of the formula is that it is the best of 

the politically feasible alternatives . . . .”). Congress’s 

inability to agree on a currently coherent formula is not a good 

reason for upholding its extension of an anachronism. 

Moreover, the Court in 1966 relied on rather a natural 

inference from the data available. The tight relationship 

between the two trigger criteria (i.e., voter turnout and the use 

of voting “tests and devices”) and evidence of discrimination 

in the states in categories one and two, made it logical to 

suppose that Congress reasonably inferred a comparable fit 

for the remaining covered jurisdictions for which direct 

evidence of discrimination was missing (i.e., those in category 

three). But today the trigger criteria have lost any inherent 

link to the key concern. The newest triggering data hark back 

to 1972, 34 years before the current formula was enacted, and 

nearly 60 years before the current act expires. Indeed, if the 

formula were to be updated to use more recent election data, it 

would cover only Hawaii. See 152 CONG. REC. H5131, 

H5181 (daily ed. July 13, 2006). 

More critically, the Court’s acceptance of the § 4(b) 

formula in 1966 was explicitly based on certain reasonable 

understandings of § 5’s focus. Explaining why it saw no 

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serious problem in the challengers’ claim of 

underinclusiveness—§ 4(b)’s exclusion of localities not

employing “tests or devices” but showing evidence of voting 

discrimination by other means—the Court observed that 

Congress had learned that persistent discrimination “has 

typically entailed the misuse of tests and devices, and this was 

the evil for which the new remedies were specifically 

designed.” Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 331 (emphasis added). 

Despite § 5’s language imposing preclearance on all manner 

of voting rules not within the act’s definition of “tests or 

devices,” the Court understandably saw the act as focused on, 

or in its words “specifically designed” for, rooting out “the 

misuse of tests and devices.” But § 5 litigation no longer 

centers at all on “tests and devices.” Instead, the majority of 

§ 5 objections today concern redistricting. See Peyton 

McCrary et al., The Law of Preclearance: Enforcing Section 

5, in THE FUTURE OF THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT 20, 25 tbl.2.1 

(David Epstein et al. eds., 2006) (redistricting objections 

comprised only 17% of Justice Department objections in the 

1970s; in the ‘90s, they constituted 52% of all objections). 

Accordingly, quite apart from the trigger criteria’s hopeless 

fossilization, the intrinsic link between them and their 

consequences has ceased to exist. 

 Nor is the coverage formula materially helped by the 

VRA’s bailout provision. Although Katzenbach did note that 

§ 4(a)’s bailout provision might alleviate concerns about 

overinclusiveness, see 383 U.S. at 331, its ability to act as a 

reliable escape hatch is questionable. In its original form, 

§ 4(a) essentially permitted bailout for any jurisdiction that 

had not used a voting “test or device” in the previous five 

years. See Voting Rights Act of 1965, Pub. L. 89-110, § 4(a), 

79 Stat. 437, 438. This in effect excluded any covered 

jurisdiction whose record was not clean as of the date of initial 

enactment, and until 1982 the later reenactments’ language 

continued that effect (i.e., allowed access to bailout only for 

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those jurisdictions with clean records as of the VRA’s initial 

adoption). While the majority correctly notes that the 1982 

amendments relaxed that constraint, see Maj. Op. at 9, those 

same amendments tightened the remaining substantive 

standards. A covered jurisdiction can now obtain bailout if, 

and only if, it can demonstrate that, during the preceding ten

years, it has (simplifying slightly): (1) effectively engaged in 

no voting discrimination (proven by the absence of any 

judicial finding of discrimination or even a Justice 

Department “objection” (unless judicially overturned)); 

(2) faithfully complied with § 5 preclearance; (3) “eliminated 

voting procedures and methods of election which inhibit or 

dilute equal access to the electoral process”; and (4) engaged 

in “constructive efforts to eliminate intimidation and 

harassment of persons exercising rights protected” under the 

act and “in other constructive efforts, such as the expanded 

opportunity for convenient registration.” 42 U.S.C. 

§ 1973b(a)(1). Perhaps because of these opaque standards, 

actual bailouts have been rare; only 136 of the more than 

12,000 covered political subdivisions (i.e., about 1%) have 

applied for bailout (all successfully). Appellant’s Reply Br. 

37; Voting Section, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Terminating 

Coverage Under the Act’s Special Provisions, 

http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/vot/misc/sec_4.php#bailout 

(last visited May 9, 2012) (listing successful bailouts). 

Moreover, a successful action under § 4(a) does not actually 

end federal oversight of bailed-out jurisdictions; for a decade 

after bailout, the court “retain[s] jurisdiction” just in case the 

Justice Department or “any aggrieved person” wishes to file a 

motion “alleging that conduct has occurred which . . . would 

have precluded” bailout in the first place. 42 U.S.C. 

§ 1973b(a)(5). 

All of this suggests that bailout may be only the most 

modest palliative to § 5’s burdens. One scholar hypothesizes 

that bailout may “exist[] more as a fictitious way out of 

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coverage than [as] an authentic way of shoring up the 

constitutionality of the coverage formula.” Persily, supra, at 

213. In fairness, the same scholar also entertains various 

other explanations, including the possibility that the eligible 

jurisdictions are just the ones for whom § 5 poses only a very 

light burden, see id. at 213-14, and ultimately concludes that 

no one knows which theory “best explains the relative absence 

of bailouts,” id. at 214. Regardless of the reason for the trivial 

number of bailouts, irrational rules—here made so by their 

encompassing six states and numerous additional jurisdictions 

not seriously different from the uncovered states—cannot be 

saved “by tacking on a waiver procedure” such as bailout. 

ALLTEL Corp. v. FCC, 838 F.2d 551, 561 (D.C. Cir. 1988); 

cf. U.S. Telecomm. Ass’n v. FCC, 359 F.3d 554, 571 (D.C. 

Cir. 2004). 

Finally the government argues that because the VRA is 

meant to protect the fundamental right of racial minorities 

(i.e., a suspect classification), a heightened level of deference 

to Congress is in order. Appellees’ Br. 22-23. Purportedly 

supporting this proposition is Chief Justice Rehnquist’s 

statement in Nevada Dep’t of Human Resources v. Hibbs, 538 

U.S. 721 (2003), that when a statute is designed to protect a 

fundamental right or to prevent discrimination based on a 

suspect classification, “it [is] easier for Congress to show a 

pattern of state constitutional violations.” Id. at 736. But the 

passage simply makes the point that where a classification is 

presumptively invalid (e.g., race), an inference of unlawful

discrimination follows almost automatically from rules or acts 

that differentiate on the presumptively forbidden basis, 

whereas for classifications judged under the “rational basis” 

test, such as disability or age, “Congress must identify, not 

just the existence of age- or disability-based state decisions, 

but a widespread pattern of irrational reliance on such 

criteria.” Id. at 735 (emphasis added). This special element 

of race or other presumptively unconstitutional classifications 

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has no bearing on review of whether Congress’s remedy “fits” 

the proven pattern of discrimination. To hold otherwise 

would ignore completely the “vital principles necessary to 

maintain separation of powers and the federal balance” that 

the Court held paramount in Boerne (which of course also 

involved a fundamental right, namely the right to practice 

one’s religion). City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507, 536 

(1997). 

* * * 

A current political dispute—state adoptions of voter 

identification requirements—highlights the oddity of § 4(b). 

In 2005, the state of Indiana enacted a law requiring its 

citizens to present a government-issued photo identification 

before voting. Against a variety of legal challenges, the 

Supreme Court upheld the law. See Crawford v. Marion 

County Election Bd., 553 U.S. 181 (2008). In 2011, Texas 

and South Carolina both passed similar laws. See Gina Smith, 

Haley Signs Voter ID Bill into Law, THE STATE, May 18, 

2011; Sommer Ingram, Gov. Rick Perry Signs Voter ID Bill 

into Law, ASSOC. PRESS, May 27, 2011, available at 

http://www.yumasun.com/articles/perry-51036-monitortxrick-austin.html. But because of those states’ inclusion under 

§ 4(b), they had to look to Justice Department attorneys in 

Washington to seek further approval. In the end, the 

Department blocked both laws. See Jerry Markon, S.C.’s 

Voter ID Law Rejected, WASH. POST, Dec. 24, 2011, at A4; 

Daniel Gilbert, Election 2012: Texas Law Requiring Voter 

IDs Is Blocked, WALL ST. J., Mar. 13, 2012, at A4. 

Why should voter ID laws from South Carolina and 

Texas be judged by different criteria (at a minimum, a 

different burden of persuasion, which is often critical in cases 

involving competing predictions of effect) from those 

governing Indiana? A glimpse at the charts shows that 

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Indiana ranks “worse” than South Carolina and Texas in 

registration and voting rates, as well as in black elected 

officials (Figures I, II and III). As to federal observers, 

Indiana appears clearly “better”—it received none (Figure 

IV). As to successful § 2 suits South Carolina and Texas are 

“worse” than Indiana, but all three are below the top ten 

offenders, which include five uncovered states (Figure V). 

This distinction in evaluating the different states’ policies is 

rational? 

Despite a congressional record of over 15,000 pages and 

22 hearings, Shelby County, 811 F. Supp. 2d at 496, there is 

little to suggest that § 4(b)’s coverage formula continues to 

capture jurisdictions with especially high levels of voter 

discrimination. To the extent that the answer is, as the district 

court suggested, that Congress wished to “continue to focus 

on those jurisdictions with the worst historical records of 

voting discrimination,” id. at 506, such an overwhelming 

focus on historical practices appears foreclosed by Northwest 

Austin’s requirement that current burdens be justified by 

current needs. 

It goes without saying that racism persists, as evidenced 

by the odious examples offered by the majority, see Maj. Op. 

at 27-29. But without more evidence distinguishing current 

conditions in the covered jurisdictions from those in the 

uncovered ones, § 4(b)’s coverage formula appears to be as 

obsolete in practice as one would expect, in a dynamic 

society, for markers 34-to-59 years old. Accordingly, I 

dissent.

* * * 

The analysis above is my sole basis for finding § 4(b) of 

the VRA unconstitutional and thus for dissenting from the 

court’s opinion. I need not and do not reach the 

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constitutionality of § 5 itself. But before concluding, I want to 

address a critical aspect of § 5, and of some of the cases 

interpreting earlier versions of that section. I address it first 

simply as a matter of language—specifically the use of 

language to obscure reality—and then in relation to the words 

and political philosophy of the 15th Amendment. Though 

unnecessary to my dissent’s outcome, the troubling tension 

between the act’s encouragement of racial gerrymandering 

and the ideals embodied in the 15th Amendment seems 

worthy of attention. 

 Section 5(b) makes unlawful any voting practice or 

procedure with respect to voting “that has the purpose of or 

will have the effect of diminishing the ability of any citizens 

of the United States on account of race or color . . . to elect 

their preferred candidates of choice.” 42 U.S.C. 1973c(b) 

(emphasis added). And of course similar phrasing has been 

included in § 2 since 1982. See Voting Rights Act 

Amendments of 1982, Pub. L. No. 97-205, § 3, 96 Stat. 131, 

134 (codified at 42 U.S.C. § 1973(b)) (prohibiting policies 

that prevent minority groups’ equal opportunity “to elect 

representatives of their choice.”). 

The language (or a close equivalent) seems to have 

originated in one of the Court’s earliest opinions on § 5, 

though only as an offhand phrase in its explanation of how a 

shift from district to at-large voting might dilute minority 

impact: “Voters who are members of a racial minority might 

well be in the majority in one district, but a decided minority 

in the county as a whole. This type of change could therefore 

nullify their ability to elect the candidate of their choice.” 

Allen v. State Bd. of Elections, 393 U.S. 544, 569 (1969). But 

the use of such language became troubling in Georgia v. 

Ashcroft, where the Court said that in the application of § 5 “a 

court should not focus solely on the comparative ability of a 

minority group to elect a candidate of its choice.” 539 U.S. 

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461, 480 (2003) (emphasis added). The “solely” of course 

indicates approval of such a consideration as one among 

several criteria for compliance with § 5. 

 Implied from the statutory “their” is necessarily a “they.” 

In the context of a statute speaking of impingements on 

citizens’ voting “on account of race or color,” and indeed in 

the universally accepted understanding of the provision, the 

“they” are necessarily members of minority groups. But in 

what sense do minority groups as such have a “preferred 

candidate”? Individuals, of course, have preferred candidates, 

but groups (unless literally monolithic) can do so only in the 

limited sense that a majority of the group may have a 

preferred candidate. Thus, when the provision is translated 

into operational English, it calls for assuring “the ability of a 

minority group’s majority to elect their preferred candidates.” 

 This raises the question of what happened to the minority 

group’s own minority—those who dissent from the 

preferences of the minority’s majority? 

Of course in any polity that features majority rule, some 

people are bound to be outvoted on an issue or a candidate 

and thus to “lose”—on that round of the ongoing political 

game. Such losses are a necessary function of any system 

requiring less than unanimity (which would be hopelessly 

impractical). And in an open society that allows people freely 

to form associations, and to design those associations, some 

people obviously will be members of associations whose 

representatives from time to time express, in their name, 

opinions they do not share. But that again is a necessary 

function of having associations free to adopt a structure that 

empowers their leadership to speak with less than unanimous 

backing. 

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 But the implied “they” of § 5 is not a polity in itself; nor 

is it an association freely created by free citizens. Quite the 

reverse: It is a group constructed artificially by the mandate 

of Congress, entirely on the lines of race or ethnicity. 

 On what authority has Congress constructed such groups? 

Purportedly the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. But that 

says that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote 

shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any 

State on account of race, color, or previous condition of 

servitude.” 

 It is hard to imagine language that could more clearly 

invoke universal individual rights. It is “citizens” who are 

protected, and they are protected from any denial of their 

rights that might be based on the specified group 

characteristics—race, color, or previous condition of 

servitude. The members of Congress who launched the 

amendment, said Senator Willard Warner, “profess to give to 

each individual an equal share of political power.” CONG.

GLOBE, 40th Cong., 3d Sess. 861 (1869). 

The 15th Amendment was a pivot point in the struggle for 

universal human rights. The roots of the struggle are deep and 

obscure. Many trace the concept to the three great 

monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. See, 

e.g., MICHELINE R. ISHAY, THE HISTORY OF HUMAN RIGHTS 

(2004) (noting the contributions of these three traditions, 

among others). No matter how spotty the actual performance 

of those religions’ adherents may have been over the 

centuries, the idea of a single God, claiming the allegiance of 

all mankind, surely implies a recognition of the dignity and 

worth of all humans, undistorted by local group loyalties 

historically linked to local gods. Perhaps the Enlightenment, 

though in tension with organized religion, has a better title; it 

is clearly the immediate root of the French Declaration of the 

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Rights of Man and of the Citizen. But at all events the 15th 

Amendment states a clear national commitment to universal, 

individual political rights regardless of race or color. 

 Of course conventional political discourse often uses such 

terms as “the black vote,” “the youth vote,” “the senior vote,” 

etc. But those who use these terms—politicians, their 

consultants, pundits, journalists—know perfectly well that 

they are oversimplifications, used to capture general political 

tendencies, not a justification for creating or assuming a 

political entity that functions through a demographic group’s 

“majority.” The Supreme Court has recognized that these 

generalizations are no such justification. In Shaw v. Reno, 

509 U.S. 629 (1993), it confronted racial gerrymandering that 

took the form of including in one district persons separated by 

geographic and political boundaries and who “may have little 

in common with one another but the color of their skin.” Id. 

at 647. Such a plan: 

bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political 

apartheid. It reinforces the perception that members of 

the same racial group—regardless of their age, education, 

economic status, or the community in which they live—

think alike, share the same political interests, and will 

prefer the same candidates at the polls. We have rejected 

such perceptions elsewhere as impermissible stereotypes. 

Id. 

The pre-Enlightenment history of continental Europe 

included just such entities—“estates,” whose members voted 

separately from those of the other estates. Most famously, 

separately elected representatives of the nobility, the clergy, 

and the “common” people gathered in 1789 in the French 

Estates-General. For the last time. By the middle of that year, 

the Estates-General had ceased to exist. By transforming 

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itself into a National Assembly, it precipitated the French 

Revolution and the permanent abolition of voting by estates, 

ultimately throughout Europe. The 15th Amendment can be 

traced back to that basic development. Section 5’s mandate to 

advance “the ability of any citizens of the United States on 

account of race or color . . . to elect their preferred candidates 

of choice” is a partial retreat to pre-Revolutionary times, an 

era perhaps now so long past that its implications are 

forgotten. 

 None of this is to suggest that the country need for a 

minute countenance deliberate voting rule manipulations 

aimed at reducing the voting impact of any racial group, 

whether in the form of restrictions on ballot access or of 

boundary-drawing. And in judicial proceedings to stamp out 

such manipulations, it would of course be no defense for the 

perpetrators to say that they sought only to downweight a 

minority’s majority. But a congressional mandate to assure 

the electoral impact of any minority’s majority seems to me 

more of a distortion than an enforcement of the 15th 

Amendment’s ban on abridging the “right of citizens of the 

United States to vote . . . on account of race, color, or previous 

condition of servitude.” Preventing intentional discrimination 

against a minority is radically different from actively 

encouraging racial gerrymandering in favor of the minority 

(really, the majority of the minority), as § 5 does. Assuming 

there are places in which a colorblind constitution does not 

suffice as a “universal constitutional principle,” Parents 

Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, 

551 U.S. 701, 788 (2007) (opinion of Kennedy, J.), the voting 

booth should not be one of them. 

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