Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-1086_1co6.pdf
Page Number: 59.0

14 

ALLEN v. MILLIGAN 

THOMAS, J., dissenting 

up the lost population, District 1 would have to extend east-
ward  through  largely  majority-white  rural  counties  along 
the length of Alabama’s border with the Florida panhandle.  
The plaintiffs do not assert that white residents on the Gulf 
Coast  have  anything  special  in  common  with  white  resi-
dents in those communities, and the District Court made no 
such finding.  The plaintiffs’ maps would thus reduce Dis-
trict  1  to  the  leftover  white  communities  of  the  southern 
fringe  of  the  State,  its  shape  and  constituents  defined  al-
most entirely by the need to make District 2 majority-black 
while also retaining a majority-black District 7. 
  The  plaintiffs’  mapmaking  experts  left  little  doubt  that 
their plans prioritized race over neutral districting criteria.  
Dr. Moon  Duchin,  who devised four  of  the  plans,  testified 
that achieving “two majority-black districts” was a “nonne-
gotiable principl[e]” in her eyes, a status shared only by our 
precedents’ “population balance” requirement.  2 App. 634; 
see also id., at 665, 678.  Only “after” those two “nonnego-
tiable[s]” were satisfied did Dr. Duchin then give lower pri-
ority  to  “contiguity”  and  “compactness.”    Id.,  at  634.    The 
architect of the other seven maps, William Cooper, consid-
ered “minority voting strengt[h]” a “traditional redistricting 
principl[e]” in its own right, id., at 591, and treated “the mi-
nority population in and of itself ” as the paramount com-
munity of interest in his plans, id., at 601. 
  Statistical  evidence  also  underscored  the  illustrative 
maps’ extreme racial sorting.  Another of the plaintiffs’ ex-
perts, Dr. Kosuke Imai, computer generated 10,000 district-
ing  plans  using  a  race-blind  algorithm  programmed  to 
observe  several  objective  districting  criteria.    Supp.  App. 
58–59.    None  of  those plans contained  even one  majority-
black district.  Id., at 61.  Dr. Imai generated another 20,000 
plans using the same algorithm, but with the additional con-
straint  that  they  must  contain  at  least  one  majority- 
black  district;  none  of  those  plans  contained  a  second  
majority-black  district,  or  even  a  second  district  with  a