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Page Number: 18.0

14 

GILL v. WHITFORD 

Opinion of the Court 

Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U. S. 555, 560, and n. 1 (1992). 

We have long recognized that a person’s right to vote is 
“individual  and  personal  in  nature.”    Reynolds  v.  Sims, 
377  U. S.  533,  561  (1964).    Thus,  “voters  who  allege  facts
showing  disadvantage  to  themselves  as  individuals  have
standing to sue” to remedy that disadvantage.  Baker, 369 
U. S., at 206.  The plaintiffs in this case alleged that they
suffered such injury from partisan gerrymandering, which
works  through  “packing”  and  “cracking”  voters  of  one
party to disadvantage those voters.  1 App. 28–29, 32–33, 
Complaint  ¶¶5,  15.  That  is,  the plaintiffs  claim  a  consti­
tutional right not to be placed in legislative districts delib­
erately  designed  to  “waste”  their  votes  in  elections  where 
their chosen candidates will win in landslides (packing) or 
are  destined  to  lose  by  closer  margins  (cracking).    Id.,  at 
32–33, ¶15.

To the extent the plaintiffs’ alleged harm is the dilution 
of their votes, that injury is district specific.  An individual 
voter in Wisconsin is placed in a single district.  He votes 
for a single representative.  The boundaries of the district, 
and  the  composition  of  its  voters,  determine  whether  and
to  what  extent  a  particular  voter  is  packed  or  cracked. 
This  “disadvantage  to  [the  voter]  as  [an]  individual[ ],” 
Baker, 369 U. S., at 206, therefore results from the bound­
aries of the particular district in which he resides.  And a 
plaintiff ’s remedy must be “limited to the inadequacy that
produced  [his]  injury  in  fact.”  Lewis  v.  Casey,  518  U. S. 
343,  357  (1996).  In  this  case  the  remedy  that  is  proper
and sufficient lies in the revision of the boundaries of the 
individual’s own district. 

For  similar  reasons,  we  have  held  that  a  plaintiff  who
alleges  that  he  is  the  object  of  a  racial  gerrymander—a
drawing of district lines on the basis of race—has standing
to assert only that his own district has been so gerryman­
dered.  See United States v. Hays, 515 U. S. 737, 744–745 
(1995).  A plaintiff who complains of gerrymandering, but