Opinion ID: 75887
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Shape

Text: 41 Putnam County's four electoral districts are relatively compact. The district court concluded that this fact militated against a finding that race predominated over this traditional districting factor. The Supreme Court, however, has rejected this conclusion. Miller instructs that bizarreness of shape is not a threshold showing for racial gerrymandering. 20 515 U.S. at 915, 115 S.Ct. 2475. Shape must be considered in conjunction with racial and population densities, id. at 917, 115 S.Ct. 2475, and in this case those factors militate against a finding that compactness trumped race when it came to reapportioning the districts. 42 Intentionally, over 90% of the county's black population was assigned to either District 1 or 2. The feather, smokestack, and pie slice all indicate that when Ms. Meggers was looking for population to shift to bring her deviation into constitutional range, race determined who should be shifted. The fact that the resulting irregularities in natural boundaries are small does not undermine the inevitable conclusion that they are there at all precisely because their racial composition helped achieve the plan's racial goals. See Miller, 515 U.S. at 917, 115 S.Ct. 2475 (such deliberate racial line-drawing supports a finding that race predominated in the redistricting process). 43 Race not only determined who was shifted in the 1992 redistricting process; even more importantly, it also determined who was not. Ms. Meggers could have reduced her almost 11% deviation from equal district population by shifting voters from the overpopulated white districts into the underpopulated contiguous black districts. She chose not to, however, because to do so would have done harm to her [racial] numbers. As a result, the County, which undertook the 1992 redistricting to correct malapportionment, remains significantly malapportioned. The County's commitment to the constitutional mandate of one-person, one-vote was secondary to its primary racial agenda. This the Constitution does not permit. Reynolds, 377 U.S. at 568, 84 S.Ct. 1362; Shaw, 509 U.S. at 642, 113 S.Ct. 2816; Miller, 515 U.S. at 913, 115 S.Ct. 2475.