JOHNSON, SPEAKER OF THE FLORIDA HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, ET AL. v. DE GRANDY ET AL.
No. 92-519
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued October 4, 1993—Decided June 30, 1994
512 U.S. 997
*Together with No. 92-593, De Grandy et al. v. Johnson, Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, et al., and No. 92-767, United States v. Florida, also on appeal from the same court.
Joel I. Klein argued the cause for appellants in No. 92-519 and appellees in Nos. 92-593 and 92-767. With him on the brief for appellees in Nos. 92-593 and 92-767 were Stephen N. Zack, Keith E. Hope, Richard E. Doran, George L. Waas, and Gerald B. Curington. Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., Scott A. Sinder, Kevin X. Crowley, James A. Peters, and Messrs. Doran, Waas, and Curington filed briefs for appellants in No. 92-519.
James A. Feldman argued the cause for the United States in all cases. With him on the briefs were Solicitor General Days, Acting Solicitor General Bryson, Acting Assistant Attorney General Turner, Acting Deputy Solicitor General Kneedler, and Jessica Dunsay Silver.
C. Allen Foster argued the cause for appellees in No. 92-519 and appellants in No. 92-593. With him on the briefs were Robert N. Hunter, Jr., Benjamin L. Ginsberg, Marshall R. Hurley, E. Thom Rumberger, and George N. Meros, Jr. E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr., John C. Keeney, Jr., Charles G. Burr, Dennis Courtland Hayes, and Willie Abrams filеd a brief in all cases for appellee Florida State Conference of NAACP Branches.†
†Marc D. Stern, Lois C. Waldman, and Richard F. Wolfson filed a brief for the American Jewish Congress et al. as amici curiae urging reversal. Briefs of amici curiae urging affirmance were filed for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law by Herbert M. Wachtell, William H. Brown III, Thomas J. Henderson, Frank R. Parker, and Brenda Wright; and for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund et al. by Kenneth Kimerling, Arthur A. Baer, Antonia Hernandez, and Judith Sanders-Castro.
JUSTICE SOUTER delivered the opinion of the Court.
These consolidated cases are about the meaning of vote dilution and the facts required to show it, when §2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is applied to challenges to single-member legislative districts. See
I
On the first day of Florida‘s 1992 legislative session, a group of Hispanic voters including Miguel De Grandy (De Grandy plaintiffs) complained in the United States District Court against the speaker of Florida‘s House of Representatives, the president of its Senate, the Governor, and other state officials (State). The complainants alleged that the districts from which Florida voters had chosen their state senators and representatives since 1982 were malapportioned, failing to reflect changes in the State‘s population during the ensuing decade. The State Conference of NAACP Branches and individual black voters (NAACP
Several months after the first complaint was filed, on April 10, 1992, the state legislature adopted Senate Joint Resolution 2-G (SJR 2-G), providing the reapportionment plan currently at issue. The plan called fоr dividing Florida into 40 single-member Senate, and 120 single-member House, districts based on population data from the 1990 census. As the Constitution of Florida required, the state attorney general then petitioned the Supreme Court of Florida for a declaratory judgment that the legislature‘s apportionment plan was valid under federal and state law. See
The De Grandy and NAACP plaintiffs responded to SJR 2-G by amending their federal complaints to charge the new
The Department of Justice filed a similar complaint, naming the State of Florida and several elected officials as defendants and claiming that SJR 2-G diluted the voting strength of blacks and Hispanics in two parts of the State in violation of §2. The Government alleged that SJR 2-G diluted the votes of the Hispanic population in an area largely covered by Dade County (including Miami) and the black population in an area covering much of Escambia County (including Pensacola).4 App. 75. The District Court consolidated this action with the other two and held a 5-day trial, followed immediately by an hours-long hearing on remedy.
At the end of the hearing, on July 1, 1992, the District Court ruled from the bench. It held the plan‘s provisions for state House districts to be in violation of §2 because “more than [SJR 2-G‘s] nine Hispanic districts may be drawn without having or creating a regressive effect upon black voters,” and it imposed a remedial plan offered by the De Grandy plaintiffs calling for 11 majority-Hispanic House dis-
In a later, expanded opinion the court reviewed the totality of circumstances as required by §2 and Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S. 30 (1986). In explaining Dade County‘s “tripartite politics,” in which “ethnic factors ... predominate over all other[s] ...,” 815 F. Supp., at 1572, the court found political cohesion within each of the Hispanic and black populations but none between the two, id., at 1569, and a tendency of non-Hispanic whites to vote as a bloc to bar minority groups from electing their chosen candidates except in a dis-
We stayed the judgment of the District Court, 505 U. S. 1232 (1992), and noted probable jurisdiction, 507 U. S. 907 (1993).
II
Before going to the issue at the heart of these cases, we need to consider the District Court‘s refusal to give preclusive effect to the decision of the State Supreme Court validating SJR 2-G. The State argues that the claims of the De Grandy plaintiffs should have been dismissed as res judicata because they had a full and fair opportunity to litigate vote dilution before the State Supreme Court, see In re Constitutionality of Senate Joint Resolution 2G, Special Apportionment Session 1992, 597 So. 2d, at 285. The premise, how-
The State balks at recognizing this express reservation by blaming the De Grandy plaintiffs for not returning to the State Supreme Court with the §2 claims. But the plaintiffs are free to litigate in any court with jurisdiction, and their choice to forgo further, optional state review hardly converted the state constitutional judgment into a decision following “full and fair opportunity to litigate,” Allen v. McCurry, 449 U. S. 90, 104 (1980), as res judicata would require. For that matter, a federal court gives no greater preclusive effect to a state-court judgment than the state court itself would do, Marrese v. American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, 470 U. S. 373, 384-386 (1985), and the Supreme Court of Florida made it plain that its preliminary look at the vote dilution claims would have no preclusive effect under Florida law.
The State does not, of course, argue that res judicata bars the claims of the United States, which was not a party in the Florida Supreme Court action. It contends instead that the Federal Government‘s §2 challenge deserved dismissal under this Court‘s Rooker/Feldman abstention doctrine, under which a party losing in state court is barred from seeking whаt in substance would be appellate review of the state
III
On the merits of the vote dilution claims covering the House districts, the crux of the State‘s argument is the power of Hispanics under SJR 2-G to elect candidates of their choice in a number of districts that mirrors their share of the Dade County area‘s voting-age population (i. e., 9 out of 20 House districts); this power, according to the State, bars any finding that the plan dilutes Hispanic voting strength. The District Court is said to have missed that conclusion by mistaking our precedents to require the plan to maximize the number of Hispanic-controlled districts.
The State‘s argument takes us back to ground covered last Term in two cases challenging single-member districts. See Voinovich v. Quilter, 507 U. S. 146 (1993); Growe v. Emison, 507 U. S. 25 (1993). In Growe, we held that a claim of vote dilution in a single-member district requires proof meeting the same three threshold conditions for a dilution challenge to a multimember district: that a minority group be “‘sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a ma-
In Voinovich we explained how manipulation of district lines can dilute the voting strength of politically cohesive minority group members, whether by fragmenting the minority voters among several districts where a bloc-voting majority can routinely outvote them, or by packing them into one or a small number of districts to minimize their influence in the districts next door. See id., at 153-154. Section 2 prohibits either sort of line-drawing where its result, “‘interact[ing] with social and historical conditions,’ impairs the ability of a protected class to elect its candidate of choice on an equal basis with other voters.” Ibid. (quoting Gingles, supra, at 47).7
Plaintiffs in Growe and Voinovich failed to show vote dilution because the former did not prove political cohesiveness of the minority group, Growe, supra, at 41-42, and the latter showed no significant white bloc voting, Voinovich, supra, at 158. Here, on the contrary, the District Court found, and the State does not challenge, the presence of both these Gingles preconditions. The dispute in this litigation centers on two quite different questions: whether Hispanics are sufficiently numerous and geographically compact to be a majority in additional single-member districts, as required by the first Gingles factor; and whether, even with all three Gingles
A
When applied to a claim that single-member districts dilute minority votes, the first Gingles condition requires the possibility of creating more than the existing number of reasonably compact districts with a sufficiently large minority population to elect candidates of its choice. The District Court found the condition satisfied by contrasting SJR 2-G with the De Grandy plan for the Dade County area, which provided for 11 reasonably compact districts, each with a voting-age population at least 64 percent Hispanic. 815 F. Supp., at 1580. While the percentage figures are not disputed, the parties disagree about the sufficiency of these supermajorities to allow Hispanics to elect representatives of their choice in all 11 districts. The District Court agreed with plaintiffs that the supermajorities would compensate for the number of voting-age Hispanics who did not vote, most commonly because they were recent immigrants who had not become citizens of the United States. Id., at 1567-1568. The State protests that fully half of the Hispanic voting-age residents of the region are not citizens, with the result that several districts in the De Grandy plan lack enough Hispanic voters to elect candidates of their choice without cross-over votes from other ethnic groups. On these assumptions, the State argues that the condition necessary to justify tinkering with the State‘s plan disappears.
We can leave this dispute without a winner. The parties’ ostensibly factual disagreement raises an issue of law about which characteristic of minority populations (e. g., age, citizenship) ought to be the touchstone for proving a dilution claim and devising a sound remedy. These cases may be resolved, however, without reaching this issue or the related
B
We do, however, part company from the District Court in assessing the totality of circumstances. The District Court found that the three Gingles preconditions were satisfied, and that Hispanics had suffered historically from official discrimination, the social, economic, and political effects of which they generally continued to feel, 815 F. Supp., at 1573-1574. Without more, and on the apparent assumption that what could have been done to create additional Hispanic supermajority districts should have been done, the District Court found a violation of §2. But the assumption was erroneous, and more is required, as a review of Gingles will show.
1
Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S. 30 (1986), prompted this Court‘s first reading of §2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 after its 1982 amendment.8 Section 2(a) of the amended Act prohibits any “standard, practice, or procedure ... which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color [or
“based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a class of citizens protected by subsection (a) of this section in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice. The extent to which members of a protected class have been elected to office in the State or political subdivision is one circumstance which may be considered: Provided, That nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.”
42 U. S. C. § 1973(b) .
Gingles provided some structure to the statute‘s “totality of circumstances” test in a case challenging multimember legislative districts. See 478 U. S., at 46-51. The Court listed the factors put forward as relevant in the Senate Report treating the 1982 amendments,9 and held that
The Court thus summarized the three now-familiar Gingles factors (compactness/numerousness, minority cohesion or bloc voting, and majority bloc voting) as “necessary preconditions,” id., at 50, for establishing vote dilution by use of a multimember district.
But if Gingles so clearly identified the three as generally necessary to prove a §2 claim, it just as clearly declined to hold them sufficient in combination, either in the sense that a court‘s examination of relevant circumstances was 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. This was true not only because bloc voting was a matter of degree, with a variable legal significance depending on other facts, id., at 55-58, but also 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. Lack of electoral success is evidence of vote dilution, but courts must also examine other evidence in the totality of circumstances, including the extent of the opportunities minority voters enjoy to participate in the po-
2
If the three Gingles factors may not be isolated as sufficient, standing alone, to prove dilution in every multimember district challenge, a fortiori they must not be when the challenge goes to a series of single-member districts, where dilution may be more difficult to grasp. Plaintiffs challenging single-member districts may claim, not total submergence, but partial submergence; not the chance for some electoral
The cases now before us, of course, fall on this more complex side of the divide, requiring a court to determine whether provision for somewhat fewer majority-minority districts than the number sought by the plaintiffs was dilution of the minority votes. The District Court was accordingly required to assess the probative significance of the Gingles factors critically after considering the further circumstances with arguable bearing on the issue of equal political opportunity. We think that in finding dilution here the District Court misjudged the relative importance of the Gingles factors and of historical discrimination, measured against evidence tending to show that in spite of these facts, SJR 2-G would provide minority voters with an equal measure of political and electoral opportunity.
The District Court did not, to be sure, commit the error of treating the three Gingles conditions as exhausting the enquiry required by §2. Consistently with Gingles, the court received evidence of racial relations outside the immediate confines of voting behavior and found a history of discrimination against Hispanic voters continuing in society generally to the present day. But the District Court was not critical enough in asking whether a history of persistent discrimination reflected in the larger society and its bloc-voting behavior portended any dilutive effect from a newly proposed districting scheme, whose pertinent features were majority-minority districts in substantial proportion to the minority‘s share of voting-age population. The court failed to ask whether the totality of facts, including those pointing to
Treating equal political opportunity as the focus of the enquiry, we do not see how these district lines, apparently providing political effectiveness in proportion to voting-age numbers, deny equal political opportunity. The record establishes that Hispanics constitute 50 percent of the voting-age population in Dade County and under SJR 2-G would make up supermajorities in 9 of the 18 House districts located primarily within the county. Likewise, if one considers the 20 House districts located at least in part within Dade County, the record indicates that Hispanics would be an effective voting majority in 45 percent of them (i. e., nine), and would constitute 47 percent of the voting-age population in the area. 815 F. Supp., at 1580; App. to Juris. Statement 180a-183a. In other words, under SJR 2-G Hispanics in the Dade County area would enjoy substantial proportionality. On this evidence, we think the State‘s scheme would thwart the historical tendency to exclude Hispanics, not encourage or perpetuate it. Thus in spite of that history and its legacy, including the racial cleavages that characterize Dade County politics today, we see no grounds for holding in these cases
The De Grandy plaintiffs urge us to put more weight on the District Court‘s findings of packing and fragmentation, allegedly accomplished by the way the State drew certain specific lines: “[T]he line of District 116 separates heavily Hispanic neighborhoods in District 112 from the rest of the heavily Hispanic Kendall Lakes area and the Kendall area,” so that the line divides “neighbors making up the ... same housing development in Kendall Lakes,” and District 114 “packs” Hispanic voters, while Districts 102 and 109 “fragmen[t]” them. 815 F. Supp., at 1569 (internal quotation marks omitted). We would agree that where a State has split (or lumped) minority neighborhoods that would have been grouped into a single district (or spread among several) if the State had employed the same line-drawing standards in minоrity neighborhoods as it used elsewhere in the jurisdiction, the inconsistent treatment might be significant evidence of a §2 violation, even in the face of proportionality. The District Court, however, made no such finding. Indeed, the propositions the court recites on this point are not even phrased as factual findings, but merely as recitations of testimony offered by plaintiffs’ expert witness. While the District Court may well have credited the testimony, the court was apparently wary of adopting the witness‘s conclusions as findings. But even if one imputed a greater significance to the accounts of testimony, they would boil down to findings that several of SJR 2-G‘s district lines separate portions of Hispanic neighborhoods, while another district line draws several Hispanic neighborhoods into a single district. This, however, would be to say only that lines could have been drawn elsewhere, nothing more. But some dividing by district lines and combining within them is virtually inevitable and befalls any population group of substantial size. Attaching the labels “packing” and “fragmenting” to these phenom-
3
It may be that the significance of the facts under §2 was obscured by the rule of thumb apparently adoрted by the District Court, that anything short of the maximum number of majority-minority districts consistent with the Gingles conditions would violate §2, at least where societal discrimination against the minority had occurred and continued to occur. But reading the first Gingles condition in effect to define dilution as a failure to maximize in the face of bloc voting (plus some other incidents of societal bias to be expected where bloc voting occurs) causes its own dangers, and they are not to be courted.
Assume a hypothetical jurisdiction of 1,000 voters divided into 10 districts of 100 each, where members of a minority group make up 40 percent of the voting population and voting is totally polarized along racial lines. With the right geographic dispersion to satisfy the compactness requirement, and with careful manipulation of district lines, the minority voters might be placed in control of as many as 7 of the 10 districts. Each such district could be drawn with at least 51 members of the minority group, and whether the remaining minority voters were added to the groupings of 51 for safety or scattered in the other three districts, minority voters would be able to elect candidates of their choice in all seven districts.12 The point of the hypothetical is not, of course, that any given district is likely to be opеn to such extreme manipulation, or that bare majorities are likely to vote in full force and strictly along racial lines, but that reading §2 to define dilution as any failure to maximize tends to
4
While, for obvious reasons, the State agrees that a failure to leverage minority political strength to the maximum possible point of power is not definitive of dilution in bloc-voting societies, it seeks to impart a measure of determinacy by applying a definitive rule of its own: that as a matter of law no dilution occurs whenever the percentage of single-member districts in which minority voters form an effective majority mirrors the minority voters’ pеrcentage of the relevant population.14 Proportionality so defined, see n. 11,
The safety would be in derogation of the statutory text and its considered purpose, however, and of the ideal that the
Even if the State‘s safe harbor were open only in cases of alleged dilution by the manipulation of district lines, however, it would rest on an unexplored premise of highly suspect validity: that in any given voting jurisdiction (or portion of that jurisdiction under consideration), the rights of some minority voters under
Finally, we reject the safe harbor rule because of a tendency the State would itself certainly condemn, a tendency to promote and perpetuate efforts to devise majority-minority districts even in circumstances where they may not be neces-
It is enough to say that, while proportionality in the sense used here is obviously an indication that minority voters have an equal opportunity, in spite of racial polarization, “to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice,”
5
While the United States concedes the relevance of proportionality to a
The argument has two flaws. There is, first, no textual reason to segregate some circumstances from the statutory totality, to be rendered insignificant unless the defendant pleads them by way of affirmative defense. Second, and just as importantly, the argument would recast these cases as they come to us, in order to bar consideration of proportionality except on statewide scope, whereas up until now the
6
In sum, the District Court‘s finding of dilution did not address the stаtutory standard of unequal political and electoral opportunity, and reflected instead a misconstruction of
Having found insufficient evidence of vote dilution in the drawing of House districts in the Dade County area, we look now to the comparable districts for the state Senate. As in the case of House districts, we understand the District Court to have misapprehended the legal test for vote dilution when it found a violation of
SJR 2-G creates 40 single-member Senate districts, 5 of them wholly within Dade County. Of these five, three have Hispanic supermajorities of at least 64 percent, and one has a clear majority of black voters. Two more Senate districts crossing county lines include substantial numbers of Dade County voters, and in one of these, black voters, although not close to a majority, are able to elect representatives of their choice with the aid of cross-over votes. 815 F. Supp., at 1574, 1579.
Within this seven-district Dade County area, both minority groups enjoy rough proportionality. The voting-age population in the seven-district area is 44.8 percent Hispanic and 15.8 percent black. Record, U. S. Exh. 7. Hispanics predominate in 42.9 percent of the districts (three out of seven), as do blacks in 14.3 percent of them (one out of seven). While these numbers indicate something just short of perfect proportionality (42.9 percent against 44.8; 14.3 percent against 15.8), the opposite is true of the five districts located wholly within Dade County.19
We affirm the District Court‘s decision to leave the State‘s plan for Florida State Senate districts undisturbed. As in the case of the House districts, the totality of circumstances appears not to support a finding of vote dilution here, where both minority groups constitute effective voting majorities in a number of state Senate districts substantially proportional to their share in the population, and where plaintiffs have not produced evidence otherwise indicating that under SJR 2-G voters in either minority group have “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”
V
There being no violation of the Voting Rights Act shown, we have no occasion to review the District Court‘s decisions going to remedy. The judgment of the District Court is accordingly affirmed in part and reversed in рart.
It is so ordered.
The critical issue in these cases is whether
But today‘s opinion does more than reject the maximization principle. The opinion‘s central teaching is that proportionality—defined as the relationship between the number of majority-minority voting districts and the minority group‘s share of the relevant population—is always relevant evidence in determining vote dilution, but is never itself dispositive. Lack of proportionality is probative evidence of vote dilution. “[A]ny theory of vote dilution must necessarily rely to some extent on a measure of minority voting strength that makes some reference to the proportion between the minority group and the electorate at large.” Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S. 30, 84 (1986) (O‘CONNOR, J., concurring in judgment). Thus, in evaluating the Gingles preconditions and the totality of the circumstances a court must always consider the relationship between the number of majority-minority voting districts and the minority group‘s share of the population. Cf. id., at 99 (“[T]he relative lack of minority electoral success under a challenged plan, when compared with the success that would be predicted under the measure of undiluted minority voting strength the court is employing, can constitute powerful evidence of vote dilution“).
In sum, the Court‘s carefully crafted approach treats proportionality as relevant evidence, but does not make it the only relevant evidence. In doing this the Court makes clear that
JUSTICE KENNEDY, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.
At trial, the plaintiffs alleged that the State violated
A more difficult question is whether proportionality, ascertained by comparing the number of majority-minority districts to the minority group‘s proportion of the relevant population, is relevant in deciding whether there has been vote dilution under
The statute, in relevant part, provides: “The extent to which members of a protected class have been elected to
Although the statutory text does not speak in precise terms to the issue, our precedents make clear that proportionality, or the lack thereof, has some relevance to a vote dilution claim under
To be sure, placing undue emphasis upon proportionality risks defeating the goals underlying the
It is important to emphasize that the precedents to which I refer, like today‘s decision, only construe the statute, and
“The moral imperative of racial neutrality is the driving force of the Equal Protection Clause.” Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co., 488 U. S. 469, 518 (1989) (KENNEDY, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment). Racial classifications “are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality,” and are presumed invalid. Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630, 643 (1993) (internal quotation marks omitted); see also A. Bickel, The Morality of Consent 133 (1975). This is true regardless of “the race of those burdened or benefited by a particular classification.” Croson, supra, at 494 (opinion of O‘CONNOR, J.); 488 U. S., at 520 (SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment). Furthermore, “[i]t is axiomatic that racial classifications do not become legitimate on the assumption that all persons
These principles apply to the drawing of electoral and political boundaries. As Justice Douglas, joined by Justice Goldberg, stated 30 years ago:
“When racial or religious lines are drawn by the State, the multiracial, multireligious communities that our Constitution seeks to weld together as one become separatist; antagonisms that relate to race or to religion rather than to political issues are generated . . . . Since that system is at war with the democratic ideal, it should find no footing here.” Wright v. Rockefeller, 376 U. S. 52, 67 (1964) (dissenting opinion).
In like fashion, Chief Justice Burger observed that the “use of a mathematical formula” to assure a minimum number of majority-minority districts “tends to sustain the existence of ghettos by promoting the notion that political clout is to be gained or maintained by marshaling particular racial, ethnic, or religious groups in enclaves.” United Jewish Organizations v. Carey, 430 U. S., at 186 (dissenting opinion). And last Term in Shaw, we voiced our agreement with these sentiments, observing that “[r]acial gerrymandering, even for remedial purposes, may balkanize us into competing racial factions; it threatens to carry us further from the goal of a political system in which race no longer matters—a goal that the
Our decision in Shaw alluded to, but did not resolve, the broad question whether “the intentional creation of majority-minority districts, without more, always gives rise to an equal protection claim.” Id., at 649 (internal quotation marks omitted); see also id., at 657. While recognizing that redistricting differs from many other kinds of state decision-
With these observations, I concur in all but Parts III-B-2, III-B-4, and IV of the Court‘s opinion and in its judgment.
JUSTICE THOMAS, with whom JUSTICE SCALIA joins, dissenting.
For the reasons I explain in Holder v. Hall, ante, p. 891, I would vacate the judgment of the District Court and remand with instructions to dismiss the actions consolidated in these cases for failure to state a claim under
Notes
The parties dispute whether the relevant figure is the minority group‘s share of the population, or of some subset of the population, such as those who are eligible to vote, in that they are United States citizens, over 18 years of age, and not registered at another address (as students and members of the military often are). Because we do not elevate this proportion to the status of a magic parameter, and becаuse it is not dispositive here, we do not resolve that dispute. See supra, at 1008-1009.
If instead one calculates the proportion of statewide Hispanic-majority House districts on the basis of total population or voting-age population, the result favors plaintiffs. Hispanics constitute 12.2 percent of the State‘s total population and 11.7 percent of the State‘s voting-age population, corresponding to 14 or 15 seats (120 × 12.2% = 14.64; 120 × 11.7% = 14.04). We need not choose among these calculations to decide these cases.