Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-1086_1co6.pdf
Page Number: 22.0

Cite as:  599 U. S. ____ (2023) 

15 

Opinion of the Court 

have  gone  unchallenged  by  Alabama  in  any  event.    See 
Cooper, 581 U. S., at 309.  Nor is there a basis to upset the 
District Court’s legal conclusions.  The Court faithfully ap-
plied our precedents and correctly determined that, under 
existing law, HB1 violated §2. 

III 
  The heart of these cases is not about the law as it exists.  
It  is  about  Alabama’s  attempt  to  remake  our  §2  jurispru-
dence anew. 
  The  centerpiece  of  the  State’s  effort  is  what  it  calls  the 
“race-neutral benchmark.”  The theory behind it is this: Us-
ing modern computer technology, mapmakers can now gen-
erate millions of possible districting maps for a given State.  
The maps can  be  designed  to  comply with traditional dis-
tricting  criteria  but  to  not  consider  race.    The  mapmaker 
can determine how many majority-minority districts exist 
in each map, and can then calculate the median or average 
number  of  majority-minority  districts  in  the  entire  multi-
million-map  set.    That  number  is  called  the  race-neutral 
benchmark. 
  The State contends that this benchmark should serve as 
the  point of  comparison  in  §2  cases.   The  benchmark, the 
State says, was derived from maps that were “race-blind”—
maps  that  cannot  have  “deni[ed]  or  abridge[d]”  anyone’s 
right to vote “on account of race” because they never took 
race into “account” in the first place.  52 U. S. C. §10301(a).  
Courts in §2 cases should therefore compare the number of 
majority-minority districts in the State’s plan to the bench-
mark.  If those numbers are similar—if the State’s map “re-
sembles”  the  benchmark  in  this  way—then,  Alabama  ar-
gues,  the  State’s  map  also  cannot  have  “deni[ed]  or 
abridge[d]” anyone’s right to vote “on account of race.”  Ibid. 
  Alabama  contends  that  its  approach  should  be  adopted 
for two reasons.  First, the State argues that a race-neutral 
benchmark best matches the text of the Voting Rights Act.