Opinion ID: 727396
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Gingles

Text: 17 and its Progeny 18 Gingles shorthands the totality of circumstances proof provided in the Senate Report recognizing the conjunction of three circumstances which, as preconditions, must be present to establish a vote dilution claim. Indeed, their presence creates the inference the challenged practice is discriminatory. First, minority plaintiffs must prove their group is sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district. Id. at 50, 106 S.Ct. at 2766. Second, plaintiffs must show the minority group is politically cohesive. Id. at 51, 106 S.Ct. at 2766. Third, they must demonstrate the white majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it--in the absence of special circumstances, such as the minority candidate running unopposed--usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidate. Id. While these three conditions are necessary to establish a vote dilution claim, they are not sufficient. Johnson v. De Grandy, 512 U.S. 997, ----, 114 S.Ct. 2647, 2657, 129 L.Ed.2d 775 (1994). 19 Under De Grandy, a court's examination of relevant circumstances is not complete once the three factors were found to exist, or in the sense that the three in combination necessarily and in all circumstances demonstrated dilution. Id. This is so because the ultimate conclusions about equality or inequality of opportunity were intended by Congress to be judgments resting on comprehensive, not limited, canvassing of relevant facts. Id. Failure to prove the totality of circumstances establishes the minority is not harmed by the challenged practice and rebuts the inference of discrimination arising from proof of the three preconditions. Uno, 72 F.3d at 980. In Growe v. Emison, 507 U.S. 25, 113 S.Ct. 1075, 122 L.Ed.2d 388 (1993), the Court expressly applied the Gingles' paradigm to a vote dilution claim against a single member district. 20
21 The first question, whether the minority group is sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district, simply asks whether any remedy is possible in the first instance. As Gingles noted: 22 The reason that a minority group making such a challenge must show, as a threshold matter, that it is sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district is this: Unless minority voters possess the potential to elect representatives in the absence of the challenged structure or practice, they cannot claim to have been injured by that structure or practice. 23 478 U.S. at 50 n. 17, 106 S.Ct. at 2766 n. 17 (emphasis in original). As a corollary, if the minority group is small and dispersed, no single member district could be created to remedy its grievance. 24 Hence, the first prerequisite asks about the existence of a legally cognizable injury. NAACP, Inc. v. City of Niagara Falls, N.Y., 65 F.3d 1002, 1011 (2d Cir.1995). As such, this element of proof assists a court in finding a reasonable alternative practice as a benchmark against which to measure the existing voting practice. Holder v. Hall, 512 U.S. 874, ----, 114 S.Ct. 2581, 2585, 129 L.Ed.2d 687 (1994). 12 The inquiries into remedy and liability, therefore, cannot be separated: A district court must determine as part of the Gingles threshold inquiry whether it can fashion a permissible remedy in the particular context of the challenged system. Nipper v. Smith, 39 F.3d 1494, 1530-31 (11th Cir.1994), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 115 S.Ct. 1795, 131 L.Ed.2d 723 (1995). 25 Because Gingles advances a functional evaluation of whether the minority population is large enough to form a district in the first instance, the Circuits have been flexible in assessing the showing made for this precondition. 26 The first Gingles precondition does not require some aesthetic ideal of compactness, but simply that the black population be sufficiently compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district. Moreover, plaintiffs' proposed district is not cast in stone. It was simply presented to demonstrate that a majority-black district is feasible.... If a § 2 violation is found, the county will be given the first opportunity to develop a remedial plan. 27 Clark v. Calhoun County, Miss., 21 F.3d 92, 95 (5th Cir.1994) (citations omitted); see also Houston v. Lafayette County, Miss., 56 F.3d 606, 611 (5th Cir.1995) (Compactness is not as narrow a standard as the district court construed it to be.). 28 Geographical compactness, then, does not implicate constitutional principles. The Constitution does not mandate regularity of district shape, the Court recently stated in Bush v. Vera, --- U.S. at ----, 116 S.Ct. at 1953 (citing Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630, 647, 113 S.Ct. 2816, 2826-27, 125 L.Ed.2d 511 (1993)) (Shaw I ). Instead, Justice Kennedy clarified, The first Gingles condition refers to the compactness of the minority population, not to the compactness of the contested district. Id. at ----, 116 S.Ct. at 1971, (Kennedy, J., concurring). Stating the concept in a different way, we must determine whether the affected minority is diffused and thus politically ineffective, not whether the area by which it is bound is geographically dense. 29 Nevertheless, as we shall see in this case, and as demonstrated recently in Shaw II and Bush, compactness is the conceptual point at which the tension between the traditional American commitment to territorial districting and the VRA concern for fair representation of group interests must be resolved. Richard H. Pildes & Richard G. Niemi, Expressive Harms, Bizarre Districts, and Voting Rights: Evaluating Election District Appearances after Shaw v. Reno, 92 Mich. L.Rev. 483, 535 (1993) [hereinafter Expressive Harms ]. And, as Shaw I warned, appearances do matter, 509 U.S. at 647, 113 S.Ct. at 2827, triggering, as they do, Fourteenth Amendment equal protection scrutiny.
30 That the minority group demonstrates it is politically cohesive embodies a similarly functional focus. If the minority group is not politically cohesive, it cannot be said that the selection of a multimember electoral structure thwarts distinctive minority group interests. Gingles, 478 U.S. at 51, 106 S.Ct. at 2766. Like the first Gingles' precondition, however, the Court does not expressly define political cohesiveness. Other courts have elaborated. 31 In Gomez v. City of Watsonville, 863 F.2d 1407, 1415 (9th Cir.1988), cert. denied, 489 U.S. 1080, 109 S.Ct. 1534, 103 L.Ed.2d 839 (1989), the Ninth Circuit observed, [t]he inquiry is essentially whether the minority group has expressed clear political preferences that are distinct from those of the majority. Thus, we judge political cohesiveness by looking at the voting preferences expressed in actual elections. Id. Necessarily, when we examine the evidence of political cohesiveness as voting preferences, we look to the same statistical evidence plaintiffs must offer to establish vote polarization. 13 Indeed, political cohesiveness is implicit in racially polarized voting. 14
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.