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Page Number: 84.0

40 

BRNOVICH v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

collection ban is just a “usual burden[ ] of voting” for every-
one.  Ante, at 30.  And in that world, “[f]raud is a real risk” 
of  ballot  collection—as  to  every  community,  in  every  cir-
cumstance—just because the State in litigation asserts that 
it is.  Ante, at 33.  The State need not even show that the 
discriminatory  rule  it enacted  is  necessary  to prevent the 
fraud it purports to fear.  So the State has no duty to sub-
stitute  a  non-discriminatory  rule  that  would  adequately 
serve its professed goal.  Like the rest of today’s opinion, the 
majority’s treatment of the collection ban thus flouts what 
Section  2  commands:  the  eradication  of  election  rules  re-
sulting in unequal opportunities for minority voters. 

IV 
  Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act to address a deep 
fault  of  our  democracy—the  historical  and  continuing  at-
tempt to withhold from a race of citizens their fair share of 
influence  on  the  political  process.    For  a  century,  African 
Americans had struggled and sacrificed to wrest their vot-
ing  rights  from  a  resistant  Nation.    The  statute  they  and 
their  allies  at  long  last  attained  made  a  promise  to  all 
Americans.  From then on, Congress demanded, the politi-
cal process would be equally open to every citizen, regard-
less of race. 
  One  does  not  hear  much  in  the  majority  opinion  about 
that promise.  One does not hear much about what brought 
Congress  to  enact  the  Voting  Rights  Act,  what  Congress 
hoped  for  it  to  achieve,  and  what  obstacles  to  that  vision 
remain today.   One would  never  guess  that  the  Act  is,  as 
the President who signed it wrote, “monumental.”  Johnson 
Papers 841.  For all the opinion reveals, the majority might 

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analysis—and here produces a significant racial disparity in the oppor-
tunity to vote.  The majority’s argument to the contrary is no better than 
if it condoned a literacy test on the ground that a State had long had a 
statutory obligation to teach all its citizens to read and write.