Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/21a375_d18f.pdf
Page Number: 17

8 

MERRILL v. MILLIGAN 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

their  claim  fails  at  an  early  stage  of  the  litigation.    See 
Strickland, 556 U. S., at 18–19.  At no time has this Court 
held that plaintiffs must answer the race-infused question 
of the first Gingles condition without any awareness of race; 
indeed, until recently, that would have been well-nigh im-
possible.  In Alabama’s view, though, the advent of comput-
erized  districting  should  change  the way the  first Gingles 
condition  operates.    Plaintiffs  can  now  use  technology  to 
generate  millions  of possible  plans, without  any  attention 
to race.  Alabama claims that some number of those plans 
(what  number  is  unclear)  must  contain  an  additional  
majority-Black district for Section 2 plaintiffs to satisfy the 
first  Gingles  condition.    See  Reply  to  Application  in  
No. 21A375, p. 1.  But whatever the pros and cons of that 
method,  this  Court  has  never  demanded  its  use;  we  have 
not so much as floated the idea, let alone considered how it 
would work.  Alabama’s stay request, then, is premised on 
an entirely new view of what the law requires. 
  To make matters worse, the record gives Alabama no ba-
sis for arguing that this case would come out differently un-
der  its  race-blind  computer-simulation  approach.    Ala-
bama’s brief centers on the supposedly show-stopper claim 
that one of the plaintiffs’ experts had randomly generated 
a large number of Alabama plans, and produced not a one 
with two majority-Black districts.  See id., at 1, 21–24.  But 
as  an  initial  matter,  Alabama  never  introduced  that  ex-
pert’s  study  into  the  record,  and  the  testimony  about  it 
takes  up  just  four  pages  of  a  nearly  2,000-page  hearing 
transcript.  See App. 236, 346–349.  In any event, the anal-
ysis was based on stale 2010 census data—not the relevant 
2020 data, which showed a relative increase in Alabama’s 
Black population.  And it did not account for several of Ala-
bama’s  traditional  districting  criteria,  including  keeping 
communities of interest (like the Black Belt) together.  See 
supra, at 4, n. 2.  When the plaintiffs’ expert was asked at 
the hearing whether a race-blind computer program could