Opinion ID: 727396
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Racial Bloc Voting

Text: 32 Gingles adopted a straightforward definition of racial bloc voting provided by the expert witness upon whom the district court had relied. Racial polarization or bloc voting exists where there is a consistent relationship between the race of the voter and the way in which the voter votes ... or to put it differently, where black voters and white voters vote differently. 478 U.S. at 53 n. 21, 106 S.Ct. at 2768 n. 21 (internal quotation marks omitted). The Court's focus was twofold: to determine whether the minority group votes cohesively and whether whites vote sufficiently as a bloc usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidates. Gingles, 478 U.S. at 56, 106 S.Ct. at 2769. The extent to which this bloc voting impairs the minority's ability to elect candidates of their choice, however, must be legally significant, a sliding scale that varies with the district and a variety of factual circumstances and may emerge more distinctly over a period of time. Id. While the Court offered no simple doctrinal test for the existence of legally significant racial bloc voting, id. at 58, 106 S.Ct. at 2770, it urged a flexible approach, noting that the isolated success of a minority candidate in a district that usually exhibits vote polarization will not alone negate plaintiffs' showing. Thus, while legally significant white bloc voting enables the majority in the ordinary course, to trounce minority-preferred candidates most of the time, its presence may be more subtle requiring close inquiry over time. Uno, 72 F.3d at 980 (citing Voinovich v. Quilter, 507 U.S. 146, 156, 113 S.Ct. 1149, 1156-57, 122 L.Ed.2d 500 (1993)). 33 To determine whether racial bias, in fact, motivated the targeted voting practice, the Court accepted the statistical method necessarily inhered to the definition of racial bloc voting. In Gingles, the district court had relied on expert testimony offered by Dr. Bernard Grofman, who used two methods of analysis of voting patterns, bivariate ecological regression analysis and homogeneous precinct analysis, also called extreme case analysis. Bivariate ecological regression analysis determines the degree of relationship between two variables--here the relationship between the racial composition in each political unit (the independent variable) and the support provided a particular candidate within that political unit (the dependent variable). Jenkins, 4 F.3d at 1119 n. 10. In an ecological regression analysis, the correlation coefficient shows which data points fall on the straight line. The linear relationship created by the two variables ideally then will pack closely together on a line. Extreme case analysis examines the actual voting percentages received by candidates in racially homogeneous precincts. The inferences that arise from the latter analysis are often graphically demonstrated by the former statistical method, the latter providing actual results to demonstrate the estimates. While homogeneous precinct analysis may be a useful check on ecological regression analysis, neither method is without disadvantage, and each, like all statistical evidence, is subject to interpretation. 15 34 However, while the Supreme Court approved the statistical proof provided by bivariate ecological regression and homogeneous precinct analysis, it did not expressly preclude other methods of establishing the presence of racial bloc voting. Nevertheless, if the third Gingles' precondition asks whether whites vote sufficiently as a bloc to enable them usually to defeat the minority candidate, it is asking how voters vote, not why voters voted that way. Indeed, the searching evaluation done in the totality of circumstances perhaps reveals the answer to the latter question. However, at the threshold, we are simply looking for proof of the correlation between the race of the voter and the defeat of the minority's preferred candidate. We do not, therefore, reject multivariate regression analysis but prefer to reserve its use, if at all, to the more global picture plaintiffs must establish.