Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-1086_1co6.pdf
Page Number: 49.0

4 

ALLEN v. MILLIGAN 

THOMAS, J., dissenting 

Voting  Rights  Act,  States  and  localities  deprived  black 
Americans of the ballot: “poll taxes, literacy tests, property 
qualifications,  white  primaries,  and  grandfather  clauses” 
(alterations and internal quotation marks omitted)).2 
  Moreover,  the  majority  drastically  overstates  the  stare 
decisis support for applying §2 to single-member districting 
plans like the one at issue here.3  As the majority implicitly 
acknowledges, this Court has only applied §2 to invalidate 
one  single-member  district  in  one  case.    See  League  of 
United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, 548 U. S. 399, 447 
(2006) (LULAC) (opinion of Kennedy, J.).  And no party in 
that case argued that the plaintiffs’ vote-dilution claim was 
not cognizable.  As for Growe v. Emison, 507 U. S. 25 (1993), 
it held only that the threshold preconditions for challenging 
—————— 

2 The  majority  suggests  that  districting  lines  are  a  “ ‘prerequisite  to 
voting’ ” because they “determin[e] where” voters “cast [their] ballot[s].”  
Ante, at 32.  But, of course, a voter’s polling place is a separate matter 
from  the  district  to  which  he  is  assigned,  and  communities  are  often 
moved  between  districts  without  changing  where  their  residents  go  to 
vote.  The majority’s other example (“who [voters] are eligible to vote for,” 
ibid.) is so far a stretch from the Act’s focus on voting qualifications and 
voter action that it speaks for itself. 

3 The majority chides Alabama for declining to specifically argue that 
§2  is  inapplicable  to  multimember  and  at-large  districting  plans.    But 
these cases are about a single-member districting plan, and it is hardly 
uncommon for parties to limit their arguments to the question presented.  
Further, while I do not myself believe that the text of §2 applies to mul-
timember or at-large plans, the idea that such plans might be especially 
problematic  from  a  vote-dilution  standpoint  is  hardly  foreign  to  the 
Court’s  precedents,  see  Johnson  v.  De  Grandy,  512  U. S.  997,  1012 
(1994); Growe v. Emison, 507 U. S. 25, 40 (1993); cf. Holder v. Hall, 512 
U. S. 874, 888 (1994) (O’Connor, J., concurring in part and concurring in 
judgment)  (explaining  that  single-member  districts  may  provide  the 
benchmark when multimember or at-large systems are challenged, but 
suggesting no benchmark for challenges to single-member districts), or 
to the historical evolution of vote-dilution claims.  Neither the case from 
which  the  1982  Congress  drew  §2(b)’s  current  operative  language,  see 
White v. Regester, 412 U. S. 755, 766 (1973), nor the one it was respond-
ing to, Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U. S. 55 (1980), involved single-member dis-
tricts.