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4 

ALLEN v. MILLIGAN 

Syllabus 

proportion  of  similarly  situated  black  voters  who share a  lineal  con-
nection to “the many enslaved people brought there to work in the an-
tebellum period.”     
  As to the second and third Gingles preconditions, the District Court 
determined that there was “no serious dispute that Black voters are 
politically  cohesive,  nor  that  the  challenged  districts’  white majority 
votes  sufficiently  as  a  bloc  to  usually  defeat  Black  voters’  preferred 
candidate.”  The court noted that, “on average, Black voters supported 
their candidates of choice with 92.3% of the vote” while “white voters 
supported Black-preferred candidates with 15.4% of the vote.”  Even 
Alabama’s  expert  conceded  “that  the  candidates  preferred  by  white 
voters in the areas that he looked at regularly defeat the candidates 
preferred by Black voters.”  Finally, the District Court concluded that 
plaintiffs  had  carried  their  burden  at  the  totality  of  circumstances 
stage  given  the  racial  polarization  of  elections  in  Alabama,  where 
“Black Alabamians enjoy virtually zero success in statewide elections” 
and where “Alabama’s extensive history of repugnant racial and vot-
ing-related discrimination is undeniable and well documented.”  The 
Court  sees  no  reason  to  disturb  the  District  Court’s  careful  factual 
findings, which are subject to clear error review and have gone unchal-
lenged by Alabama in any event.  Pp. 11–15. 

(b) The  Court  declines  to  remake its §2  jurisprudence  in  line  with 

Alabama’s “race-neutral benchmark” theory.  

(1) The Court rejects the State’s contention that adopting the race-
neutral benchmark as the point of comparison in §2 cases would best 
match the text of the VRA.  Section 2 requires political processes in a 
State to be “equally open” such that minority voters do not “have less 
opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the 
political  process  and  to  elect  representatives  of  their  choice.”  
§10301(b).  Under the Court’s precedents, a district is not equally open 
when  minority  voters  face—unlike  their  majority  peers—bloc  voting 
along  racial  lines,  arising  against  the  backdrop  of  substantial  racial 
discrimination within the State, that renders a minority vote unequal 
to a vote by a nonminority voter.  Alabama would ignore this precedent 
in favor of a rationale that a State’s map cannot “abridge[ ]” a person’s 
right to vote “on account of race” if the map resembles a sufficient num-
ber of race-neutral alternatives.  But this Court’s cases have consist-
ently  focused,  for  purposes  of  litigation,  on  the  specific  illustrative 
maps  that  a  plaintiff  adduces.    Deviation  from  that  map  shows  it  is 
possible that the State’s map has a disparate effect on account of race.  
The remainder of the Gingles test helps determine whether that pos-
sibility  is  reality  by  looking  to  polarized  voting  preferences  and  the 
frequency of racially discriminatory actions taken by the State. 
  The Court declines to adopt Alabama’s interpretation of §2, which