Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee

NOTICE: This opinion is subject to
formal revision before publication in the preliminary print of the
United States Reports. Readers are requested to notify the Reporter
of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Washington,
D. C. 20543, of any typographical or other formal errors, in
order that corrections may be made before the preliminary print
goes to press.

															SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

															_________________

															Nos. 19–1257 and 19–1258

															_________________

															MARK BRNOVICH, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF
ARIZONA, et al., PETITIONERS

															19–1257 v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE,
et al.

															ARIZONA REPUBLICAN PARTY, et al.,
PETITIONERS

															19–1258 v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE,
et al.

															on writs of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the ninth circuit

															[July 1, 2021]

															Justice Alito delivered the opinion of the
Court.

															In these cases, we are called upon for the first
time to apply §2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to regulations
that govern how ballots are collected and counted. Arizona law
generally makes it very easy to vote. All voters may vote by mail
or in person for nearly a month before election day, but Arizona
imposes two restrictions that are claimed to be unlawful. First, in
some counties, voters who choose to cast a ballot in person on
election day must vote in their own precincts or else their ballots
will not be counted. Second, mail-in ballots cannot be collected by
anyone other than an election official, a mail carrier, or a
voter’s family member, household member, or caregiver. After a
trial, a District Court upheld these rules, as did a panel of the
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But an en
banc court, by a divided vote, found them to be unlawful. It relied
on the rules’ small disparate impacts on members of minority
groups, as well as past discrimination dating back to the State’s
territorial days. And it overturned the District Court’s finding
that the Arizona Legislature did not adopt the ballot-collection
restriction for a discriminatory purpose. We now hold that the en
banc court misunderstood and misapplied §2 and that it exceeded its
authority in rejecting the District Court’s factual finding on the
issue of legislative intent.

															I

															A

															Congress enacted the landmark Voting Rights
Act of 1965, 79Stat. 437, as amended, 52 U. S. C. §10301 et seq. , in an effort to achieve at long last what the
Fifteenth Amendment had sought to bring about 95 years earlier: an
end to the denial of the right to vote based on race. Ratified in
1870, the Fifteenth Amendment provides in §1 that “[t]he right of
citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or
abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race,
color, or previous condition of servitude.” Section 2 of the
Amendment then grants Congress the “power to enforce [the
Amendment] by appropriate legislation.”

															Despite the ratification of the Fifteenth
Amendment, the right of African-Americans to vote was heavily
suppressed for nearly a century. States employed a variety of
notorious methods, including poll taxes, literacy tests, property
qualifications, “ ‘white primar[ies],’ ” and
“ ‘grandfather clause[s].’ ”[ 1 ] Challenges to some blatant efforts reached this Court
and were held to violate the Fifteenth Amendment. See, e.g. , Guinn v. United States , 238 U.S.
347 , 360–365 (1915) (grandfather clause); Myers v. Anderson , 238 U.S.
368 , 379–380 (1915) (same); Lane v. Wilson , 307 U.S.
268 , 275–277 (1939) (registration scheme predicated on
grandfather clause); Smith v. Allwright , 321 U.S.
649 , 659–666 (1944) (white primaries); Schnell v. Davis , 336 U.S. 933 (1949) ( per curiam ), affirming 81 F. Supp. 872 (SD Ala. 1949) (test of constitutional
knowledge); Gomillion v. Lightfoot , 364 U.S.
339 , 347 (1960) (racial gerrymander). But as late as the
mid-1960s, black registration and voting rates in some States were
appallingly low. See South Carolina v. Katzenbach , 383
U.S. 301 , 313 (1966).

															Invoking the power conferred by §2 of the
Fifteenth Amendment, see 383 U. S., at 308; City of
Rome v. United States , 446 U.S.
156 , 173 (1980), Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act (VRA)
to address this entrenched problem. The Act and its amendments in
the 1970s specifically forbade some of the practices that had been
used to suppress black voting. See §§4(a), (c), 79Stat. 438–439;
§6, 84Stat. 315; §102, 89Stat. 400, as amended, 52
U. S. C. §§10303(a), (c), 10501 (prohibiting the denial
of the right to vote in any election for failure to pass a test
demonstrating literacy, educational achievement or knowledge of any
particular subject, or good moral character); see also §10, 79Stat.
442, as amended, 52 U. S. C. §10306 (declaring poll taxes
unlawful); §11, 79Stat. 443, as amended, 52 U. S. C.
§10307 (prohibiting intimidation and the refusal to allow or count
votes). Sections 4 and 5 of the VRA imposed special requirements
for States and subdivisions where violations of the right to vote
had been severe. And §2 addressed the denial or abridgment of the
right to vote in any part of the country.

															As originally enacted, §2 closely tracked the
language of the Amendment it was adopted to enforce. Section 2
stated simply that “[n]o voting qualification or prerequisite to
voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or
applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge
the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of
race or color.” 79Stat. 437.

															Unlike other provisions of the VRA, §2 attracted
relatively little attention during the congressional
debates[ 2 ] and was
“little-used” for more than a decade after its passage.[ 3 ] But during the same period, this
Court considered several cases involving “vote-dilution” claims
asserted under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment. See Whitcomb v. Chavis , 403 U.S.
124 (1971); Burns v. Richardson , 384 U.S.
73 (1966); Fortson v. Dorsey , 379 U.S.
433 (1965). In these and later vote-dilution cases, plaintiffs
claimed that features of legislative districting plans, including
the configuration of legislative districts and the use of
multi-member districts, diluted the ability of particular voters to
affect the outcome of elections.

															One Fourteenth Amendment vote-dilution case, White v. Regester , 412 U.S.
755 (1973), came to have outsized importance in the development
of our VRA case law. In White , the Court affirmed a District
Court’s judgment that two multi-member electoral districts were
“being used invidiously to cancel out or minimize the voting
strength of racial groups.” Id. , at 765. The Court explained
what a vote-dilution plaintiff must prove, and the words the Court
chose would later assume great importance in VRA §2 matters.
According to White , a vote-dilution plaintiff had to show
that “the political processes leading to nomination and election
were not equally open to participation by the group in
question—that its members had less opportunity than did
other residents in the district to participate in the political
processes and to elect legislators of their choice.” Id. , at
766 (emphasis added). The decision then recited many pieces of
evidence the District Court had taken into account, and it found
that this evidence sufficed to prove the plaintiffs’ claim. See id. , at 766–769. The decision in White predated Washington v. Davis , 426 U.S.
229 (1976), where the Court held that an equal-protection
challenge to a facially neutral rule requires proof of
discriminatory purpose or intent, id. , at 238–245, and the White opinion said nothing one way or the other about
purpose or intent.

															A few years later, the question whether a VRA §2
claim required discriminatory purpose or intent came before this
Court in Mobile v. Bolden , 446 U.S.
55 (1980). The plurality opinion for four Justices concluded
first that §2 of the VRA added nothing to the protections afforded
by the Fifteenth Amendment. Id. , at 60–61. The plurality
then observed that prior decisions “ha[d] made clear that action by
a State that is racially neutral on its face violates the Fifteenth
Amendment only if motivated by a discriminatory purpose.” Id. , at 62. The obvious result of those premises was that
facially neutral voting practices violate §2 only if motivated by a
discriminatory purpose. The plurality read White as
consistent with this requirement. Bolden , 446 U. S., at
68–70.

															Shortly after Bolden was handed down,
Congress amended §2 of the VRA. The oft-cited Report of the Senate
Judiciary Committee accompanying the 1982 Amendment stated that the
amendment’s purpose was to repudiate Bolden and establish a
new vote-dilution test based on what the Court had said in White . See S. Rep. No. 97–417, pp. 2, 15–16, 27. The
bill that was initially passed by the House of Representatives
included what is now §2(a). In place of the phrase “to deny or
abridge the right . . . to vote on account of race or
color,” the amendment substituted “in a manner which results
in a denial or abridgement of the right . . . to vote
on account of race or color.” H. R. Rep. No. 97–227,
p. 48 (1981) (emphasis added); H. R. 3112, 97th Cong., 1st
Sess., §2, p. 8 (introduced Oct. 7, 1981).

															The House bill “originally passed
. . . under a loose understanding that §2 would prohibit
all discriminatory ‘effects’ of voting practices, and that intent
would be ‘irrelevant,’ ” but “[t]his version met stiff
resistance in the Senate.” Mississippi Republican Executive
Committee v. Brooks , 469 U.S.
1002 , 1010 (1984) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting) (quoting
H. R. Rep. No. 97–227, at 29). The House and Senate
compromised, and the final product included language proposed by
Senator Dole. 469 U. S., at 1010–1011; S. Rep. No.
97–417, at 3–4; 128 Cong. Rec. 14131–14133 (1982) (Sen. Dole
describing his amendment).

															What is now §2(b) was added, and that provision
sets out what must be shown to prove a §2 violation. It requires
consideration of “the totality of circumstances” in each case and
demands proof 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 protected
class “ 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.” 52
U. S. C. §10301(b) (emphasis added). Reflecting the
Senate Judiciary Committee’s stated focus on the issue of vote
dilution, this language was taken almost verbatim from White .

															This concentration on the contentious issue of
vote dilution reflected the results of the Senate Judiciary
Committee’s extensive survey of what it regarded as Fifteenth
Amendment violations that called out for legislative redress. See, e.g ., S. Rep. No. 97–417, at 6, 8, 23–24, 27, 29. That
survey listed many examples of what the Committee took to be
unconstitutional vote dilution, but the survey identified only
three isolated episodes involving the outright denial of the right
to vote, and none of these concerned the equal application of a
facially neutral rule specifying the time, place, or manner of
voting. See id. , at 30, and n. 119.[ 4 ] These sparse results were presumably good news.
They likely showed that the VRA and other efforts had achieved a
large measure of success in combating the previously widespread
practice of using such rules to hinder minority groups from
voting.

															This Court first construed the amended §2 in Thornburg v. Gingles , 478 U.S.
30 (1986)—another vote-dilution case. Justice Brennan’s opinion
for the Court set out three threshold requirements for proving a §2
vote-dilution claim, and, taking its cue from the Senate Report,
provided a non-exhaustive list of factors to be considered in
determining whether §2 had been violated. Id. , at 44–45,
48–51, 80. “The essence of a §2 claim,” the Court said, “is that a
certain electoral law, practice, or structure interacts with social
and historical conditions to cause an inequality in the
opportunities” of minority and non-minority voters to elect their
preferred representatives. Id. , at 47.

															In the years since Gingles , we have heard
a steady stream of §2 vote-dilution cases,[ 5 ] but until today, we have not considered how §2
applies to generally applicable time, place, or manner voting
rules. In recent years, however, such claims have proliferated in
the lower courts.[ 6 ]

															B

															The present dispute concerns two features of
Arizona voting law, which generally makes it quite easy for
residents to vote. All Arizonans may vote by mail for 27 days
before an election using an “early ballot.” Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann.
§§16–541 (2015), 16–542(C) (Cum. Supp. 2020). No special excuse is
needed, §§16–541(A), 16–542(A), and any voter may ask to be sent an
early ballot automatically in future elections, §16–544(A) (2015).
In addition, during the 27 days before an election, Arizonans may
vote in person at an early voting location in each county. See
§§16–542(A), (E). And they may also vote in person on election
day.

															Each county is free to conduct election-day
voting either by using the traditional precinct model or by setting
up “voting centers.” §16–411(B)(4) (Cum. Supp. 2020). Voting
centers are equipped to provide all voters in a county with the
appropriate ballot for the precinct in which they are registered,
and this allows voters in the county to use whichever vote center
they prefer. See ibid .

															The regulations at issue in this suit govern
precinct-based election-day voting and early mail-in voting. Voters
who choose to vote in person on election day in a county that uses
the precinct system must vote in their assigned precincts. See
§16–122 (2015); see also §16–135. If a voter goes to the wrong
polling place, poll workers are trained to direct the voter to the
right location. Democratic Nat. Comm. v. Reagan , 329
F. Supp. 3d 824, 859 (Ariz. 2018); see Tr. 1559, 1586 (Oct.
12, 2017); Tr. Exh. 370 (Pima County Elections Inspectors
Handbook). If a voter finds that his or her name does not appear on
the register at what the voter believes is the right precinct, the
voter ordinarily may cast a provisional ballot. Ariz. Rev. Stat.
Ann. §16–584 (Cum. Supp. 2020). That ballot is later counted if the
voter’s address is determined to be within the precinct. See ibid. But if it turns out that the voter cast a ballot at
the wrong precinct, that vote is not counted. See §16–584(E); App.
37–41 (election procedures manual); Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann.
§16–452(C) (misdemeanor to violate rules in election procedures
manual).

															For those who choose to vote early by mail,
Arizona has long required that “[o]nly the elector may be in
possession of that elector’s unvoted early ballot.” §16–542(D). In
2016, the state legislature enacted House Bill 2023 (HB 2023),
which makes it a crime for any person other than a postal worker,
an elections official, or a voter’s caregiver, family member, or
household member to knowingly collect an early ballot—either before
or after it has been completed. §§16–1005(H)–(I).

															In 2016, the Democratic National Committee and
certain affiliates brought this suit and named as defendants (among
others) the Arizona attorney general and secretary of state in
their official capacities. Among other things, the plaintiffs
claimed that both the State’s refusal to count ballots cast in the
wrong precinct and its ballot-collection restriction “adversely and
disparately affect Arizona’s American Indian, Hispanic, and African
American citizens,” in violation of §2 of the VRA. Democratic
Nat. Comm. v. Hobbs , 948 F.3d 989, 998 (CA9 2020) (en
banc). In addition, they alleged that the ballot-collection
restriction was “enacted with discriminatory intent” and thus
violated both §2 of the VRA and the Fifteenth Amendment. Ibid. After a 10-day bench trial, 329 F. Supp.
3d, at 832, 833–838, the District Court made extensive findings of
fact and rejected all the plaintiffs’ claims, id. , at
838–883. The court first found that the out-of-precinct policy “has
no meaningfully disparate impact on the opportunities of minority
voters to elect” representatives of their choice. Id. , at
872. The percentage of ballots invalidated under this policy was
very small (0.15% of all ballots cast in 2016) and decreasing, and
while the percentages were slightly higher for members of minority
groups, the court found that this disparity “does not result in
minorities having unequal access to the political process.” Ibid. The court also found that the plaintiffs had not
proved that the policy “causes minorities to show up to vote at the
wrong precinct at rates higher than their non-minority
counterparts,” id. , at 873, and the court noted that the
plaintiffs had not even challenged “the manner in which Arizona
counties allocate and assign polling places or Arizona’s
requirement that voters re-register to vote when they move,” ibid .

															The District Court similarly found that the
ballot- collection restriction is unlikely to “cause a meaningful
inequality in the electoral opportunities of minorities.” Id. , at 871. Rather, the court noted, the restriction
applies equally to all voters and “does not impose burdens beyond
those traditionally associated with voting.” Ibid. The court
observed that the plaintiffs had presented no records showing how
many voters had previously relied on now-prohibited third-party
ballot collectors and that the plaintiffs also had “provided no
quantitative or statistical evidence” of the percentage of minority
and non-minority voters in this group. Id. , at 866. “[T]he
vast majority” of early voters, the court found, “do not return
their ballots with the assistance of a [now-prohibited] third-party
collector,” id. , at 845, and the evidence largely showed
that those who had used such collectors in the past “ha[d] done so
out of convenience or personal preference, or because of
circumstances that Arizona law adequately accommodates in other
ways,” id. , at 847.[ 7 ]
In addition, the court noted, none of the individual voters called
by the plaintiffs had even claimed that the ballot-collection
restriction “would make it significantly more difficult to vote.” Id. , at 871.

															Finally, the court found that the
ballot-collection law had not been enacted with discriminatory
intent. “[T]he majority of H.B. 2023’s proponents,” the court
found, “were sincere in their belief that ballot collection
increased the risk of early voting fraud, and that H.B. 2023 was a
necessary prophylactic measure to bring early mail ballot security
in line with in-person voting.” Id. , at 879. The court added
that “some individual legislators and proponents were motivated in
part by partisan interests.” Id., at 882. But it
distinguished between partisan and racial motives, while
recognizing that “racially polarized voting can sometimes blur the
lines.” Ibid. A divided panel of the Ninth Circuit affirmed,
but an en banc court reversed. The en banc court first concluded
that both the out-of-precinct policy and the ballot-collection
restriction imposed disparate burdens on minority voters because
such voters were more likely to be adversely affected by those
rules. 948 F. 3d, at 1014–1016, 1032–1033. Then, based on an
assessment of the vote-dilution factors used in Gingles , the
en banc majority found that these disparate burdens were “in part
caused by or linked to ‘social and historical conditions’ ”
that produce inequality. 948 F. 3d, at 1032 (quoting Gingles , 478 U. S., at 47); see 948 F. 3d, at
1037. Among other things, the court relied on racial discrimination
dating back to Arizona’s territorial days, current socioeconomic
disparities, racially polarized voting, and racial campaign
appeals. See id ., at 1016–1032, 1033–1037.

															The en banc majority also held that the District
Court had committed clear error in finding that the
ballot-collection law was not enacted with discriminatory intent.
The en banc court did not claim that a majority of legislators had
voted for the law for a discriminatory purpose, but the court held
that these lawmakers “were used as ‘cat’s paws’ ” by others. Id. , at 1041.

															One judge in the majority declined to join the
court’s holding on discriminatory intent, and four others dissented
across the board. A petition for a writ of certiorari was filed by
the Arizona attorney general on his own behalf and on behalf of the
State, which had intervened below; another petition was filed by
the Arizona Republican Party and other private parties who also had
intervened. We granted the petitions and agreed to review both the
Ninth Circuit’s understanding and application of VRA §2 and its
holding on discriminatory intent. 591 U. S. ___ (2020).

															II

															We begin with two preliminary matters.
Secretary of State Hobbs contends that no petitioner has Article
III standing to appeal the decision below as to the out-of-precinct
policy, but we reject that argument. All that is needed to
entertain an appeal of that issue is one party with standing, see Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania , 591 U. S. ___, ___, n. 6 (2020)
(slip op., at 13, n. 6), and we are satisfied that Attorney
General Brnovich fits the bill. The State of Arizona intervened
below, see App. 834; there is “[n]o doubt” as an Article III matter
that “the State itself c[an] press this appeal,” Virginia House
of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill , 587 U. S. ___, ___
(2019) (slip op., at 4); and the attorney general is authorized to
represent the State in any action in federal court, Ariz. Rev.
Stat. Ann. §41–193(A)(3) (2021); see Arizonans for Official
English v. Arizona , 520 U.S.
43 , 51, n. 4 (1997).

															Second, we think it prudent to make clear at the
beginning that we decline in these cases to announce a test to
govern all VRA §2 claims involving rules, like those at issue here,
that specify the time, place, or manner for casting ballots. Each
of the parties advocated a different test, as did many amici and the courts below. In a brief filed in December in support of
petitioners, the Department of Justice proposed one such test but
later disavowed the analysis in that brief.[ 8 ] The Department informed us, however, that it did not
disagree with its prior conclusion that the two provisions of
Arizona law at issue in these cases do not violate §2 of the Voting
Rights Act.[ 9 ] All told, no
fewer than 10 tests have been proposed. But as this is our first
foray into the area, we think it sufficient for present purposes to
identify certain guideposts that lead us to our decision in these
cases.

															III

															A

															We start with the text of VRA §2. It now
provides:

															“(a) No voting qualification or prerequisite
to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or
applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner 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 in
contravention of the guarantees set forth in section
10303(f )(2) of this title, as provided in subsection (b).

															“(b) A violation of subsection (a) is
established if, 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) 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.” 52
U. S. C. §10301.

															In Gingles , our seminal §2 vote-dilution
case, the Court quoted the text of amended §2 and then jumped right
to the Senate Judiciary Committee Report, which focused on the
issue of vote dilution. 478 U. S., at 36–37, 43, and
n. 7. Our many subsequent vote-dilution cases have largely
followed the path that Gingles charted. But because this is
our first §2 time, place, or manner case, a fresh look at the
statutory text is appropriate. Today, our statutory interpretation
cases almost always start with a careful consideration of the text,
and there is no reason to do otherwise here.

															B

															Section 2(a), as noted, omits the phrase “to
deny or abridge the right . . . to vote on account of
race or color,” which the Bolden plurality had interpreted
to require proof of discriminatory intent. In place of that
language, §2(a) substitutes the phrase “in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right
. . . to vote on account of race or color.” (Emphasis
added.) We need not decide what this text would mean if it stood
alone because §2(b), which was added to win Senate approval,
explains what must be shown to establish a §2 violation. Section
2(b) states that §2 is violated only where “the political processes
leading to nomination or election” are not “ equally open to
participation” by members of the relevant protected group “ 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.” (Emphasis added.)

															The key requirement is that the political
processes leading to nomination and election (here, the process of
voting) must be “equally open” to minority and non-minority groups
alike, and the most relevant definition of the term “open,” as used
in §2(b), is “without restrictions as to who may participate,”
Random House Dictionary of the English Language 1008 (J. Stein ed.
1966), or “requiring no special status, identification, or permit
for entry or participation,” Webster’s Third New International
Dictionary 1579 (1976).

															What §2(b) means by voting that is not “equally
open” is further explained by this language: “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 phrase “in that” is “used to specify the
respect in which a statement is true.”[ 10 ] Thus, equal openness and equal opportunity are not
separate requirements. Instead, equal opportunity helps to explain
the meaning of equal openness. And the term “opportunity” means,
among other things, “a combination of circumstances, time, and
place suitable or favorable for a particular activity or action.” Id ., at 1583; see also Random House Dictionary of the
English Language, at 1010 (“an appropriate or favorable time or
occasion,” “a situation or condition favorable for attainment of a
goal”).

															Putting these terms together, it appears that
the core of §2(b) is the requirement that voting be “equally open.”
The statute’s reference to equal “opportunity” may stretch that
concept to some degree to include consideration of a person’s
ability to use the means that are equally open. But equal
openness remains the touchstone.

															C

															One other important feature of §2(b) stands
out. The provision requires consideration of “the totality of
circumstances.” Thus, any circumstance that has a logical bearing
on whether voting is “equally open” and affords equal “opportunity”
may be considered. We will not attempt to compile an exhaustive
list, but several important circumstances should be mentioned.

															1

															1. First, the size of the burden imposed by a
challenged voting rule is highly relevant. The concepts of
“open[ness]” and “opportunity” connote the absence of obstacles and
burdens that block or seriously hinder voting, and therefore the
size of the burden imposed by a voting rule is important. After
all, every voting rule imposes a burden of some sort. Voting takes
time and, for almost everyone, some travel, even if only to a
nearby mailbox. Casting a vote, whether by following the directions
for using a voting machine or completing a paper ballot, requires
compliance with certain rules. But because voting necessarily
requires some effort and compliance with some rules, the concept of
a voting system that is “equally open” and that furnishes an equal
“opportunity” to cast a ballot must tolerate the “usual burdens of
voting.” Crawford v. Marion County Election Bd. , 553 U.S.
181 , 198 (2008) (opinion of Stevens, J.). Mere inconvenience
cannot be enough to demonstrate a violation of §2.[ 11 ]

															2. For similar reasons, the degree to which a
voting rule departs from what was standard practice when §2 was
amended in 1982 is a relevant consideration. Because every voting
rule imposes a burden of some sort, it is useful to have benchmarks
with which the burdens imposed by a challenged rule can be
compared. The burdens associated with the rules in widespread use
when §2 was adopted are therefore useful in gauging whether the
burdens imposed by a challenged rule are sufficient to prevent
voting from being equally “open” or furnishing an equal
“opportunity” to vote in the sense meant by §2. Therefore, it is
relevant that in 1982 States typically required nearly all voters
to cast their ballots in person on election day and allowed only
narrow and tightly defined categories of voters to cast absentee
ballots. See, e.g. , 17 N. Y. Elec. Law Ann. §8–100 et seq. (West 1978), §8–300 et seq. (in-person voting), §8–400 et seq. (limited-excuse
absentee voting); Pa. Stat. Ann., Tit. 25, §3045 et seq. (Purdon 1963) (in-person voting), §3149.1 et seq. (limited-excuse absentee voting); see §3146.1
(Purdon Cum. Supp. 1993) (same); Ohio Rev. Code Ann. §3501.02 et seq. (Lexis 1972) (in-person voting), §3509.01 et seq. (limited-excuse absentee voting); see §3509.02
(Lexis Supp. 1986) (same); Fla. Stat. Ann. §101.011 et seq. (1973) (in-person voting), §101.62 et seq. (limited-excuse absentee voting); see §97.063
(1982) (same); Ill. Rev. Stat., ch.46, §17–1 et seq. (West 1977) (in-person voting), §19–1 et seq. (limited-excuse absentee voting); D. C. Code §§1–1109, 1–1110
(1973) (in-person voting and limited-excuse absentee voting); see
§1–1313 (1981) (same). As of January 1980, only three States
permitted no-excuse absentee voting. See Gronke &
Galanes-Rosenbaum, America Votes! 261, 267–269 (B. Griffith ed.
2008); see also J. Sargent et al., Congressional Research
Service, The Growth of Early and Nonprecinct Place Balloting, in
Election Laws of the Fifty States and the District of Columbia
(rev. 1976). We doubt that Congress intended to uproot facially
neutral time, place, and manner regulations that have a long
pedigree or are in widespread use in the United States. We have no
need to decide whether adherence to, or a return to, a 1982
framework is necessarily lawful under §2, but the degree to which a
challenged rule has a long pedigree or is in widespread use in the
United States is a circumstance that must be taken into
account.

															3. The size of any disparities in a rule’s
impact on members of different racial or ethnic groups is also an
important factor to consider. Small disparities are less likely
than large ones to indicate that a system is not equally open. To
the extent that minority and non-minority groups differ with
respect to employment, wealth, and education, even neutral
regulations, no matter how crafted, may well result in some
predictable disparities in rates of voting and noncompliance with
voting rules. But the mere fact there is some disparity in impact
does not necessarily mean that a system is not equally open or that
it does not give everyone an equal opportunity to vote. The size of
any disparity matters. And in assessing the size of any disparity,
a meaningful comparison is essential. What are at bottom very small
differences should not be artificially magnified. E.g. , Frank v. Walker , 768 F.3d 744, 752, n. 3 (CA7
2014).

															4. Next, courts must consider the opportunities
provided by a State’s entire system of voting when assessing the
burden imposed by a challenged provision. This follows from §2(b)’s
reference to the collective concept of a State’s “political
processes” and its “political process” as a whole. Thus, where a
State provides multiple ways to vote, any burden imposed on voters
who choose one of the available options cannot be evaluated without
also taking into account the other available means.

															5. Finally, the strength of the state interests
served by a challenged voting rule is also an important factor that
must be taken into account. As noted, every voting rule imposes a
burden of some sort, and therefore, in determining “based on the
totality of circumstances” whether a rule goes too far, it is
important to consider the reason for the rule. Rules that are
supported by strong state interests are less likely to violate
§2.

															One strong and entirely legitimate state
interest is the prevention of fraud. Fraud can affect the outcome
of a close election, and fraudulent votes dilute the right of
citizens to cast ballots that carry appropriate weight. Fraud can
also undermine public confidence in the fairness of elections and
the perceived legitimacy of the announced outcome.

															Ensuring that every vote is cast freely, without
intimidation or undue influence, is also a valid and important
state interest. This interest helped to spur the adoption of what
soon became standard practice in this country and in other
democratic nations the world round: the use of private voting
booths. See Burson v. Freeman , 504 U.S.
191 , 202–205 (1992) (plurality opinion).

															2

															While the factors set out above are important,
others considered by some lower courts are less helpful in a case
like the ones at hand. First, it is important to keep in mind that
the Gingles or “Senate” factors grew out of and were
designed for use in vote-dilution cases. Some of those factors are
plainly inapplicable in a case involving a challenge to a facially
neutral time, place, or manner voting rule. Factors three and four
concern districting and election procedures like “majority vote
requirements,” “anti-single shot provisions,”[ 12 ] and a “candidate slating process.”[ 13 ] See Gingles , 478
U. S., at 37 (internal quotation marks omitted). Factors two,
six, and seven (which concern racially polarized voting, racially
tinged campaign appeals, and the election of minority-group
candidates), ibid. , have a bearing on whether a districting
plan affects the opportunity of minority voters to elect their
candidates of choice. But in cases involving neutral time, place,
and manner rules, the only relevance of these and the remaining
factors is to show that minority group members suffered
discrimination in the past (factor one) and that effects of that
discrimination persist (factor five). Id., at 36–37. We do
not suggest that these factors should be disregarded. After all,
§2(b) requires consideration of “the totality of circumstances.”
But their relevance is much less direct.

															We also do not find the disparate-impact model
employed in Title VII and Fair Housing Act cases useful here. The
text of the relevant provisions of Title VII and the Fair Housing
Act differ from that of VRA §2, and it is not obvious why Congress
would conform rules regulating voting to those regulating
employment and housing. For example, we think it inappropriate to
read §2 to impose a strict “necessity requirement” that would force
States to demonstrate that their legitimate interests can be
accomplished only by means of the voting regulations in question.
Stephanopoulos, Disparate Impact, Unified Law, 128 Yale L. J.
1566, 1617–1619 (2019) (advocating such a requirement). Demanding
such a tight fit would have the effect of invalidating a great many
neutral voting regulations with long pedigrees that are reasonable
means of pursuing legitimate interests. It would also transfer much
of the authority to regulate election procedures from the States to
the federal courts. For those reasons, the Title VII and Fair
Housing Act models are unhelpful in §2 cases.

															D

															The interpretation set out above follows
directly from what §2 commands: consideration of “the totality of
circumstances” that have a bearing on whether a State makes voting
“equally open” to all and gives everyone an equal “opportunity” to
vote. The dissent, by contrast, would rewrite the text of §2 and
make it turn almost entirely on just one circumstance—disparate
impact.

															That is a radical project, and the dissent
strains mightily to obscure its objective. To that end, it spends
20 pages discussing matters that have little bearing on the
questions before us. The dissent provides historical background
that all Americans should remember, see post , at 3–7
(opinion of Kagan, J.), but that background does not tell us how to
decide these cases. The dissent quarrels with the decision in Shelby County v. Holder , 570
U.S. 529 (2013), see post , at 7–9, which concerned §§4
and 5 of the VRA, not §2. It discusses all sorts of voting rules
that are not at issue here. See post , at 9–12. And it dwells
on points of law that nobody disputes: that §2 applies to a broad
range of voting rules, practices, and procedures; that an
“abridgement” of the right to vote under §2 does not require
outright denial of the right; that §2 does not demand proof of
discriminatory purpose; and that a “facially neutral” law or
practice may violate that provision. See post, at 12–20.

															Only after this extended effort at misdirection
is the dissent’s aim finally unveiled: to undo as much as possible
the compromise that was reached between the House and Senate when
§2 was amended in 1982. Recall that the version originally passed
by the House did not contain §2(b) and was thought to prohibit any
voting practice that had “discriminatory effects,” loosely defined.
See supra , at 5–6. That is the freewheeling disparate-impact
regime the dissent wants to impose on the States. But the version
enacted into law includes §2(b), and that subsection directs us to
consider “the totality of circumstances,” not, as the dissent would
have it, the totality of just one circumstance.[ 14 ] There is nothing to the dissent’s
charge that we are departing from the statutory text by identifying
some of those considerations.

															We have listed five relevant circumstances and
have explained why they all stem from the statutory text and have a
bearing on the determination that §2 requires. The dissent does not
mention a single additional consideration, and it does its best to
push aside all but one of the circumstances we discuss. It entirely
rejects three of them: the size of the burden imposed by a
challenged rule, see post , at 22–23, the landscape of voting
rules both in 1982 and in the present, post, at
24–25,[ 15 ] and the
availability of other ways to vote, post, at 23–24. Unable
to bring itself to completely reject consideration of the state
interests that a challenged rule serves, the dissent tries to
diminish the significance of this circumstance as much as possible.
See post, at 26–29. According to the dissent, an interest
served by a voting rule, no matter how compelling, cannot support
the rule unless a State can prove to the satisfaction of the courts
that this interest could not be served by any other means. Post , at 17–18, 26–29. Such a requirement has no footing in
the text of §2 or our precedent construing it.[ 16 ]

															That requirement also would have the potential
to invalidate just about any voting rule a State adopts. Take the
example of a State’s interest in preventing voting fraud. Even if a
State could point to a history of serious voting fraud within its
own borders, the dissent would apparently strike down a rule
designed to prevent fraud unless the State could demonstrate an
inability to combat voting fraud in any other way, such as by
hiring more investigators and prosecutors, prioritizing voting
fraud investigations, and heightening criminal penalties. Nothing
about equal openness and equal opportunity dictates such a high bar
for States to pursue their legitimate interests.

															With all other circumstances swept away, all
that remains in the dissent’s approach is the size of any disparity
in a rule’s impact on members of protected groups. As we have
noted, differences in employment, wealth, and education may make it
virtually impossible for a State to devise rules that do not have
some disparate impact. But under the dissent’s interpretation of
§2, any “statistically significant” disparity—wherever that is in the statute—may be enough to take down even facially neutral
voting rules with long pedigrees that reasonably pursue important
state interests. Post , at 15, n. 4, 19–20,
32–33.[ 17 ]

															Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act provides
vital protection against discriminatory voting rules, and no one
suggests that discrimination in voting has been extirpated or that
the threat has been eliminated. But §2 does not deprive the States
of their authority to establish non-discriminatory voting rules,
and that is precisely what the dissent’s radical interpretation
would mean in practice. The dissent is correct that the Voting
Rights Act exemplifies our country’s commitment to democracy, but
there is nothing democratic about the dissent’s attempt to bring
about a wholesale transfer of the authority to set voting rules
from the States to the federal courts.

															IV

															A

															In light of the principles set out above,
neither Arizona’s out-of-precinct rule nor its ballot-collection
law violates §2 of the VRA. Arizona’s out-of-precinct rule enforces
the requirement that voters who choose to vote in person on
election day must do so in their assigned precincts. Having to
identify one’s own polling place and then travel there to vote does
not exceed the “usual burdens of voting.” Crawford , 553
U. S., at 198 (opinion of Stevens, J.) (noting the same about
making a trip to the department of motor vehicles). On the
contrary, these tasks are quintessential examples of the usual
burdens of voting.

															Not only are these unremarkable burdens, but the
District Court’s uncontested findings show that the State made
extensive efforts to reduce their impact on the number of valid
votes ultimately cast. The State makes accurate precinct
information available to all voters. When precincts or polling
places are altered between elections, each registered voter is sent
a notice showing the voter’s new polling place. 329 F. Supp.
3d, at 859. Arizona law also mandates that election officials send
a sample ballot to each household that includes a registered voter
who has not opted to be placed on the permanent early voter list,
Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. §16–510(C) (2015), and this mailing also
identifies the voter’s proper polling location, 329 F. Supp.
3d, at 859. In addition, the Arizona secretary of state’s office
sends voters pamphlets that include information (in both English
and Spanish) about how to identify their assigned precinct. Ibid. Polling place information is also made available
by other means. The secretary of state’s office operates websites
that provide voter-specific polling place information and allow
voters to make inquiries to the secretary’s staff. Ibid .
Arizona’s two most populous counties, Maricopa and Pima, provide
online polling place locators with information available in English
and Spanish. Ibid. Other groups offer similar online tools. Ibid. Voters may also identify their assigned polling place
by calling the office of their respective county recorder. Ibid. And on election day, poll workers in at least some
counties are trained to redirect voters who arrive at the wrong
precinct. Ibid ; see Tr. 1559, 1586; Tr. Exh. 370 (Pima
County Elections Inspectors Handbook).

															The burdens of identifying and traveling to
one’s assigned precinct are also modest when considering Arizona’s
“political processes” as a whole. The Court of Appeals noted that
Arizona leads other States in the rate of votes rejected on the
ground that they were cast in the wrong precinct, and the court
attributed this to frequent changes in polling locations, confusing
placement of polling places, and high levels of residential
mobility. 948 F. 3d, at 1000–1004. But even if it is
marginally harder for Arizona voters to find their assigned polling
places, the State offers other easy ways to vote. Any voter can
request an early ballot without excuse. Any voter can ask to be
placed on the permanent early voter list so that an early ballot
will be mailed automatically. Voters may drop off their early
ballots at any polling place, even one to which they are not
assigned. And for nearly a month before election day, any voter can
vote in person at an early voting location in his or her county.
The availability of those options likely explains why
out-of-precinct votes on election day make up such a small and
apparently diminishing portion of overall ballots cast—0.47% of all
ballots in the 2012 general election and just 0.15% in 2016. 329
F. Supp. 3d, at 872.

															Next, the racial disparity in burdens allegedly
caused by the out-of-precinct policy is small in absolute terms.
The District Court accepted the plaintiffs’ evidence that, of the
Arizona counties that reported out-of-precinct ballots in the 2016
general election, a little over 1% of Hispanic voters, 1% of
African-American voters, and 1% of Native American voters who voted
on election day cast an out-of-precinct ballot. Ibid. For
non-minority voters, the rate was around 0.5%. Ibid . (citing
Tr. Exh. 97, at 3, 20–21). A policy that appears to work for 98% or
more of voters to whom it applies—minority and non-minority
alike—is unlikely to render a system unequally open.

															The Court of Appeals attempted to paint a
different picture, but its use of statistics was highly misleading
for reasons that were well explained by Judge Easterbrook in a §2
case involving voter IDs. As he put it, a distorted picture can be
created by dividing one percentage by another. Frank , 768
F. 3d, at 752, n. 3. He gave this example: “If 99.9% of
whites had photo IDs, and 99.7% of blacks did,” it could be said
that “ ‘blacks are three times as likely as whites to lack
qualifying ID’ (0.3 ÷ 0.1 = 3), but such a statement would mask the
fact that the populations were effectively identical.” Ibid. That is exactly what the en banc Ninth Circuit
did here. The District Court found that among the counties that
reported out-of-precinct ballots in the 2016 general election,
roughly 99% of Hispanic voters, 99% of African-American voters, and
99% of Native American voters who voted on election day cast their
ballots in the right precinct, while roughly 99.5% of non-minority
voters did so. 329 F. Supp. 3d, at 872. Based on these
statistics, the en banc Ninth Circuit concluded that “minority
voters in Arizona cast [out-of-precinct] ballots at twice the rate
of white voters.” 948 F. 3d, at 1014; see id. , at
1004–1005. This is precisely the sort of statistical manipulation
that Judge Easterbrook rightly criticized, namely, 1.0 ÷ 0.5 = 2.
Properly understood, the statistics show only a small disparity
that provides little support for concluding that Arizona’s
political processes are not equally open.

															The Court of Appeals’ decision also failed to
give appropriate weight to the state interests that the
out-of-precinct rule serves. Not counting out-of-precinct votes
induces compliance with the requirement that Arizonans who choose
to vote in-person on election day do so at their assigned polling
places. And as the District Court recognized, precinct-based voting
furthers important state interests. It helps to distribute voters
more evenly among polling places and thus reduces wait times. It
can put polling places closer to voter residences than would a more
centralized voting-center model. In addition, precinct-based voting
helps to ensure that each voter receives a ballot that lists only
the candidates and public questions on which he or she can vote,
and this orderly administration tends to decrease voter confusion
and increase voter confidence in elections. See 329 F. Supp.
3d, at 878. It is also significant that precinct-based voting has a
long pedigree in the United States. See 948 F. 3d, at
1062–1063 (Bybee, J., dissenting) (citing J. Harris, Election
Administration in the United States 206–207 (1934)). And the policy
of not counting out-of-precinct ballots is widespread. See 948
F. 3d, at 1072–1088 (collecting and categorizing state
laws).

															The Court of Appeals discounted the State’s
interests because, in its view, there was no evidence that a less
restrictive alternative would threaten the integrity of
precinct-based voting. The court thought the State had no good
reason for not counting an out-of-precinct voter’s choices with
respect to the candidates and issues also on the ballot in the
voter’s proper precinct. See id ., at 1030–1031. We disagree
with this reasoning.

															Section 2 does not require a State to show that
its chosen policy is absolutely necessary or that a less
restrictive means would not adequately serve the State’s
objectives. And the Court of Appeals’ preferred alternative would
have obvious disadvantages. Partially counting out-of-precinct
ballots would complicate the process of tabulation and could lead
to disputes and delay. In addition, as one of the en banc
dissenters noted, it would tend to encourage voters who are
primarily interested in only national or state-wide elections to
vote in whichever place is most convenient even if they know that
it is not their assigned polling place. See id. , at
1065–1066 (opinion of Bybee, J.).

															In light of the modest burdens allegedly imposed
by Arizona’s out-of-precinct policy, the small size of its
disparate impact, and the State’s justifications, we conclude the
rule does not violate §2 of the VRA.[ 18 ]

															B

															HB 2023 likewise passes muster under the
results test of §2. Arizonans who receive early ballots can submit
them by going to a mailbox, a post office, an early ballot drop
box, or an authorized election official’s office within the 27-day
early voting period. They can also drop off their ballots at any
polling place or voting center on election day, and in order to do
so, they can skip the line of voters waiting to vote in person. 329
F. Supp. 3d, at 839 (citing ECF Doc. 361, ¶57). Making any of
these trips—much like traveling to an assigned polling place—falls
squarely within the heartland of the “usual burdens of voting.” Crawford , 553 U. S., at 198 (opinion of Stevens, J.).
And voters can also ask a statutorily authorized proxy—a family
member, a household member, or a caregiver—to mail a ballot or drop
it off at any time within 27 days of an election.

															Arizona also makes special provision for certain
groups of voters who are unable to use the early voting system.
Every county must establish a special election board to serve
voters who are “confined as the result of a continuing illness or
physical disability,” are unable to go to the polls on election
day, and do not wish to cast an early vote by mail. Ariz. Rev.
Stat. Ann. §16–549(C) (Cum. Supp. 2020). At the request of a voter
in this group, the board will deliver a ballot in person and return
it on the voter’s behalf. §§16–549(C), (E). Arizona law also
requires employers to give employees time off to vote when they are
otherwise scheduled to work certain shifts on election day. §16–402
(2015).

															The plaintiffs were unable to provide
statistical evidence showing that HB 2023 had a disparate impact on
minority voters. Instead, they called witnesses who testified that
third-party ballot collection tends to be used most heavily in
disadvantaged communities and that minorities in Arizona—especially
Native Americans—are disproportionately disadvantaged. 329
F. Supp. 3d, at 868, 870. But from that evidence the District
Court could conclude only that prior to HB 2023’s enactment,
“minorities generically were more likely than non-minorities to
return their early ballots with the assistance of third parties.” Id. , at 870. How much more, the court could not say from the
record. Ibid. Neither can we. And without more concrete
evidence, we cannot conclude that HB 2023 results in less
opportunity to participate in the political process.[ 19 ]

															Even if the plaintiffs had shown a disparate
burden caused by HB 2023, the State’s justifications would suffice
to avoid §2 liability. “A State indisputably has a compelling
interest in preserving the integrity of its election process.” Purcell v. Gonzalez , 549 U.S.
1 , 4 (2006) ( per curiam ) (internal quotation marks
omitted). Limiting the classes of persons who may handle early
ballots to those less likely to have ulterior motives deters
potential fraud and improves voter confidence. That was the view of
the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform chaired by
former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James
Baker. The Carter-Baker Commission noted that “[a]bsentee balloting
is vulnerable to abuse in several ways: . . . Citizens
who vote at home, at nursing homes, at the workplace, or in church
are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to
intimidation.” Report of the Comm’n on Fed. Election Reform,
Building Confidence in U. S. Elections 46 (Sept. 2005).

															The Commission warned that “[v]ote buying
schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by
mail,” and it recommended that “States therefore should reduce the
risks of fraud and abuse in absentee voting by prohibiting
‘third-party’ organizations, candidates, and political party
activists from handling absentee ballots.” Ibid. The
Commission ultimately recommended that States limit the classes of
persons who may handle absentee ballots to “the voter, an
acknowledged family member, the U. S. Postal Service or other
legitimate shipper, or election officials.” Id. , at 47. HB
2023 is even more permissive in that it also authorizes
ballot-handling by a voter’s household member and caregiver. See
Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. §16–1005(I)(2). Restrictions on ballot
collection are also common in other States. See 948 F. 3d, at
1068–1069, 1088–1143 (Bybee, J., dissenting) (collecting state
provisions).

															The Court of Appeals thought that the State’s
justifications for HB 2023 were tenuous in large part because there
was no evidence that fraud in connection with early ballots had
occurred in Arizona. See id. , at 1045–1046. But prevention
of fraud is not the only legitimate interest served by restrictions
on ballot collection. As the Carter-Baker Commission recognized,
third-party ballot collection can lead to pressure and
intimidation. And it should go without saying that a State may take
action to prevent election fraud without waiting for it to occur
and be detected within its own borders. Section 2’s command that
the political processes remain equally open surely does not demand
that “a State’s political system sustain some level of damage
before the legislature [can] take corrective action.” Munro v. Socialist Workers Party , 479 U.S.
189 , 195 (1986). Fraud is a real risk that accompanies mail-in
voting even if Arizona had the good fortune to avoid it. Election
fraud has had serious consequences in other States. For example,
the North Carolina Board of Elections invalidated the results of a
2018 race for a seat in the House of Representatives for evidence
of fraudulent mail-in ballots.[ 20 ] The Arizona Legislature was not obligated to wait for
something similar to happen closer to home.[ 21 ]

															As with the out-of-precinct policy, the modest
evidence of racially disparate burdens caused by HB 2023, in light
of the State’s justifications, leads us to the conclusion that the
law does not violate §2 of the VRA.

															V

															We also granted certiorari to review whether
the Court of Appeals erred in concluding that HB 2023 was enacted
with a discriminatory purpose. The District Court found that it was
not, 329 F. Supp. 3d, at 882, and appellate review of that
conclusion is for clear error, Pullman-Standard v. Swint , 456 U.S.
273 , 287–288 (1982). If the district court’s view of the
evidence is plausible in light of the entire record, an appellate
court may not reverse even if it is convinced that it would have
weighed the evidence differently in the first instance. Anderson v. Bessemer City , 470
U.S. 564 , 573–574 (1985). “Where there are two permissible
views of the evidence, the factfinder’s choice between them cannot
be clearly erroneous.” Id. , at 574.

															The District Court’s finding on the question of
discriminatory intent had ample support in the record. Applying the
familiar approach outlined in Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. , 429 U.S.
252 , 266–268 (1977), the District Court considered the
historical background and the sequence of events leading to HB
2023’s enactment; it looked for any departures from the normal
legislative process; it considered relevant legislative history;
and it weighed the law’s impact on different racial groups. See 329
F. Supp. 3d, at 879.

															The court noted, among other things, that HB
2023’s enactment followed increased use of ballot collection as a
Democratic get-out-the-vote strategy and came “on the heels of
several prior efforts to restrict ballot collection, some of which
were spearheaded by former Arizona State Senator Don Shooter.” Id ., at 879. Shooter’s own election in 2010 had been close
and racially polarized. Aiming in part to frustrate the Democratic
Party’s get-out-the-vote strategy, Shooter made what the court
termed “unfounded and often far-fetched allegations of ballot
collection fraud.” Id. , at 880. But what came after the
airing of Shooter’s claims and a “racially-tinged” video created by
a private party was a serious legislative debate on the wisdom of
early mail-in voting. Ibid. [ 22 ]

															That debate, the District Court concluded, was
sincere and led to the passage of HB 2023 in 2016. Proponents of
the bill repeatedly argued that mail-in ballots are more
susceptible to fraud than in-person voting. Ibid. The bill
found support from a few minority officials and organizations, one
of which expressed concern that ballot collectors were taking
advantage of elderly Latino voters. Ibid. And while some
opponents of the bill accused Republican legislators of harboring
racially discriminatory motives, that view was not uniform. See ibid . One Democratic state senator pithily described the
“ ‘problem’ ” HB 2023 aimed to “ ‘solv[e]’ ” as
the fact that “ ‘one party is better at collecting ballots
than the other one.’ ” Id. , at 882 (quoting Tr. Exh.
25, at 35).

															We are more than satisfied that the District
Court’s interpretation of the evidence is permissible. The spark
for the debate over mail-in voting may well have been provided by
one Senator’s enflamed partisanship, but partisan motives are not
the same as racial motives. See Cooper v. Harris , 581
U. S. ___, ___–___ (2017) (slip op., at 19–20). The District
Court noted that the voting preferences of members of a racial
group may make the former look like the latter, but it carefully
distinguished between the two. See 329 F. Supp. 3d, at 879,
882. And while the District Court recognized that the
“racially-tinged” video helped spur the debate about ballot
collection, it found no evidence that the legislature as a whole
was imbued with racial motives. Id., at 879–880.

															The Court of Appeals did not dispute the
District Court’s assessment of the sincerity of HB 2023’s
proponents. It even agreed that some members of the legislature had
a “sincere, though mistaken, non-race-based belief that there had
been fraud in third-party ballot collection, and that the problem
needed to be addressed.” 948 F. 3d, at 1040. The Court of
Appeals nevertheless concluded that the District Court committed
clear error by failing to apply a “ ‘cat’s paw’ ” theory
sometimes used in employment discrimination cases. Id., at
1040–1041. A “cat’s paw” is a “dupe” who is “used by another to
accomplish his purposes.” Webster’s New International Dictionary
425 (2d ed. 1934). A plaintiff in a “cat’s paw” case typically
seeks to hold the plaintiff ’s employer liable for “the animus
of a supervisor who was not charged with making the ultimate
[adverse] employment decision.” Staub v. Proctor
Hospital , 562 U.S.
411 , 415 (2011).

															The “cat’s paw” theory has no application to
legislative bodies. The theory rests on the agency relationship
that exists between an employer and a supervisor, but the
legislators who vote to adopt a bill are not the agents of the
bill’s sponsor or proponents. Under our form of government,
legislators have a duty to exercise their judgment and to represent
their constituents. It is insulting to suggest that they are mere
dupes or tools.

															*  *  *

															Arizona’s out-of-precinct policy and HB 2023
do not violate §2 of the VRA, and HB 2023 was not enacted with a
racially discriminatory purpose. The judgment of the Court of
Appeals is reversed, and the cases are remanded for further
proceedings consistent with this opinion.

															It is so ordered. Notes 1 H. R. Rep. No.
439, 89th Cong., 1st Sess., 8, 11–13 (1965); S. Rep. No. 162,
89th Cong., 1st Sess., pt. 3, pp. 4–5 (1965); see South
Carolina v. Katzenbach , 383 U.S.
301 , 309–315 (1966). 2 See Mobile v. Bolden , 446 U.S.
55 , 60–61 (1980) (plurality opinion) (describing §2’s “sparse”
legislative history). 3 Boyd & Markman, The
1982 Amendments to the Voting Rights Act: A Legislative History, 40
Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 1347, 1352–1353 (1983). 4 See Brown v. Post , 279 F. Supp. 60 , 63 (WD La. 1968) (parish clerks discriminated
with respect to absentee voting); United States v. Post , 297 F. Supp. 46 , 51 (WD La. 1969) (election official induced
blacks to vote in accordance with outdated procedures and made
votes ineffective); Toney v. White , 488 F.2d 310, 312
(CA5 1973) (registrar discriminated in purging voting
rolls). 5 See Chisom v. Roemer , 501 U.S.
380 (1991) (multi-member district); Houston Lawyers’
Assn. v. Attorney General of Tex. , 501 U.S.
419 (1991) (at-large elections); Voinovich v. Quilter , 507 U.S.
146 (1993) (districting); Growe v. Emison , 507 U.S.
25 (1993) (same); Holder v. Hall , 512 U.S.
874 (1994) (single-member commission); Johnson v. De
Grandy , 512 U.S.
997 (1994) (districting); Abrams v. Johnson , 521 U.S.
74 (1997) (same); League of United Latin American
Citizens v. Perry , 548 U.S.
399 (2006) (same); Abbott v. Perez , 585
U. S. ___ (2018) (same). 6 See Brief for Sen. Ted
Cruz et al. as Amici Curiae 22–24 (describing §2
challenges to laws regulating absentee voting, precinct voting,
early voting periods, voter identification (ID), election observer
zones, same-day registration, durational residency, and
straight-ticket voting); Brief for State of Ohio et al. as Amici Curiae 23–25 (describing various §2 challenges); Brief
for Liberty Justice Center as Amicus Curiae 1–3, 7–11
(describing long-running §2 challenges to Wisconsin voter ID
law). 7 An ill or disabled voter
may have a ballot delivered by a special election board, and
curbside voting at polling places is also allowed. 329
F. Supp. 3d, at 848. 8 Letter from E. Kneedler,
Deputy Solicitor General, to S. Harris, Clerk of Court (Feb. 16,
2021). 9 Ibid. 10 The
New Oxford American Dictionary 851 (2d ed. 2005); see 7 Oxford
English Dictionary 763 (2d ed. 1989) (“in presence, view, or
consequence of the fact that”); Webster’s New International
Dictionary 1253 (2d ed. 1934) (“Because; for the reason
that”). 11 There
is a difference between openness and opportunity, on the one hand,
and the absence of inconvenience, on the other. For example,
suppose that an exhibit at a museum in a particular city is open to
everyone free of charge every day of the week for several months.
Some residents of the city who have the opportunity to view the
exhibit may find it inconvenient to do so for many reasons—the
problem of finding parking, dislike of public transportation,
anticipation that the exhibit will be crowded, a plethora of
weekend chores and obligations, etc. Or, to take another example, a
college course may be open to all students and all may have the
opportunity to enroll, but some students may find it inconvenient
to take the class for a variety of reasons. For example, classes
may occur too early in the morning or on Friday afternoon; too much
reading may be assigned; the professor may have a reputation as a
hard grader; etc. 12 Where
voters are allowed to vote for multiple candidates in a race for
multiple seats, single-shot voting is the practice of voting for
only one candidate. “ ‘ “Single-shot voting enables a
minority group to win some at-large seats if it concentrates its
vote behind a limited number of candidates and if the vote of the
majority is divided among a number of candidates.” ’ ” Gingles , 478 U. S., at 38–39, n. 5 (quoting City of Rome v. United States , 446 U.S.
156 , 184, n. 19 (1980)); see also United States Commission
on Civil Rights, The Voting Rights Act: Ten Years After 206–207
(1975). 13 Slating has been described as “a
process in which some influential non-governmental organization
selects and endorses a group or ‘slate’ of candidates, rendering
the election little more than a stamp of approval for the
candidates selected.” Westwego Citizens for Better Govt. v. Westwego , 946 F.2d 1109, 1116, n. 5 (CA5 1991).
Exclusion from such a system can make it difficult for minority
groups to elect their preferred candidates. See, e.g. , White v. Regester , 412 U.S.
755 , 766–767, and n. 11 (1973) (describing one
example). 14 The
dissent erroneously claims that the Senate-House compromise was
only about proportional representation and not about “the
equal-access right” at issue in the present cases. Post , at
19, n. 6. The text of the bill initially passed by the House
had no equal-access right. See H. R. Rep. No. 97–227, p. 48
(1981); H. R. 3112, 97th Cong., 1st Sess., §2, p. 8
(introduced Oct. 7, 1981). Section 2(b) was the Senate’s creation,
and that provision is what directed courts to look beyond mere
“results” to whether a State’s “political processes” are “equally
open,” considering “the totality of circumstances.” See Mississippi Republican Executive Committee v. Brooks , 469 U.S.
1002 , 1010 (1984) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting) (“The compromise
bill retained the ‘results’ language but also incorporated language
directly from this Court’s opinion in White v. Regester ”). And while the proviso on proportional
representation may not apply as directly in this suit, it is still
a signal that §2 imposes something other than a pure
disparate-impact regime. 15 The
dissent objects to consideration of the 1982 landscape because even
rules that were prevalent at that time are invalid under §2 if
they, well, violate §2. Post, at 24. We of course agree with
that tautology. But the question is what it means to provide
equal opportunity, and given that every voting rule imposes some
amount of burden, rules that were and are commonplace are useful
comparators when considering the totality of circumstances. Unlike
the dissent, Congress did not set its sights on every facially
neutral time, place, or manner voting rule in existence. See, e.g., S. Rep. No. 97–417, at 10, n. 22 (describing what
the Senate Judiciary Committee viewed as “blatant direct
impediments to voting”). 16 For
support, the dissent offers a baseless reading of one of our
vote-dilution decisions. In Houston Lawyers’ Assn. , 501 U.S.
419 , we considered a §2 challenge to an electoral scheme
wherein all trial judges in a judicial district were elected on a
district-wide basis. Id., at 422. The State asserted that it
had a strong interest in district-wide judicial elections on the
theory that they make every individual judge at least partly
accountable to minority voters in the jurisdiction. Id., at
424, 426. That unique interest, the State contended, should have
“automatically” exempted the electoral scheme from §2 scrutiny
altogether. Id., at 426. We disagreed, holding that the
State’s interest was instead “a legitimate factor to be considered
by courts among the ‘totality of circumstances’ in determining
whether a §2 violation has occurred.” Ibid. To illustrate
why an “automati[c]” exemption from §2’s coverage was
inappropriate, the Court hypothesized a case involving an “uncouth”
district shaped like the one in Gomillion v. Lightfoot , 364 U.S.
339 , 340 (1960), for which an inquiry under §2 “would at least
arguably be required.” 501 U. S., at 427. The Court then wrote
the language upon which the dissent seizes: “Placing elections for
single-member offices entirely beyond the scope of coverage of §2
would preclude such an inquiry, even if the State’s interest in
maintaining the ‘uncouth’ electoral system was trivial or illusory
and even if any resulting impairment of a minority group’s voting
strength could be remedied without significantly impairing the
State’s interest in electing judges on a district-wide basis.” Id., at 427–428. That reductio ad absurdum , used to
demonstrate only why an automatic exemption from §2 scrutiny was
inappropriate, did not announce an “inquiry” at all—much less the
least-burdensome-means requirement the dissent would have us
smuggle in from materially different statutory regimes. Post , at 18, n. 5, 26. Perhaps that is why no
one —not the parties, not the United States, not the 36 other amici , not the courts below, and certainly not this Court in
subsequent decisions—has advanced the dissent’s surprising reading
of a single phrase in Houston Lawyers Assn . The dissent
apparently thinks that in 1991 we silently abrogated the principle
that the nature of a State’s interest is but one of many factors to
consider, see Thornburg v. Gingles , 478 U.S.
30 , 44–45 (1986), and that our subsequent cases have erred by
failing simply to ask whether a less burdensome measure would
suffice. Who knew? 17 We do
not think §2 is so procrustean. Statistical significance may
provide “evidence that something besides random error is at work,”
Federal Judicial Center, Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence
252 (3d ed. 2011), but it does not necessarily determine causes,
and as the dissent acknowledges, post, at 15, n. 4, it
is not the be-all and end-all of disparate-impact analysis. See
Federal Judicial Center, Reference Manual, at 252 (“[S]ignificant
differences . . . are not evidence that [what is at
work] is legally or practically important. Statisticians
distinguish between statistical and practical significance to make
the point. When practical significance is lacking—when the size of
a disparity is negligible—there is no reason to worry about
statistical significance”); ibid. , n. 102 (citing
authorities). Moreover, whatever might be “standard” in other
contexts, post, at 15, n. 4, we have explained that VRA
§2’s focus on equal “open[ness]” and equal “opportunity” does not
impose a standard disparate-impact regime. 18 In
arguing that Arizona’s out-of-precinct policy violates §2, the
dissent focuses on the State’s decisions about the siting of
polling places and the frequency with which voting precincts are
changed. See post , at 33 (“Much of the story has to do with
the siting and shifting of polling places”). But the plaintiffs did
not challenge those practices. See 329 F. Supp. 3d, at 873
(“Plaintiffs . . . do not challenge the manner in which
Arizona counties allocate and assign polling places or Arizona’s
requirement that voters re-register to vote when they move”). The
dissent is thus left with the unenviable task of explaining how
something like a 0.5% disparity in discarded ballots between
minority and non-minority groups suffices to render Arizona’s
political processes not equally open to participation. See supra, at 27–28. A voting rule with that effect would not
be—to use the dissent’s florid example—one that a “minority vote
suppressor in Arizona” would want in his or her “bag of tricks.” Post , at 33. 19 Not
one to let the absence of a key finding get in the way, the dissent
concludes from its own review of the evidence that HB 2023
“prevents many Native Americans from making effective use of one of
the principal means of voting in Arizona,” and that “[w]hat is an
inconsequential burden for others is for these citizens a severe
hardship.” Post , at 38. What is missing from those
statements is any evidence about the actual size of the disparity.
(For that matter, by the time the dissent gets around to assessing
HB 2023, it appears to have lost its zeal for statistical
significance, which is nowhere to be seen. See post , at
35–40, and n. 13.) The reader will search in vain to discover
where the District Court “found” to what extent HB 2023 would make
it “ ‘significantly more difficult’ ” for Native
Americans to vote. Post, at 39, n. 15 (citing 329
F. Supp. 3d, at 868, 870). Rather, “[b]ased on” the very same
evidence the dissent cites, the District Court could find only that
minorities were “generically” more likely than non-minorities to
make use of third-party ballot-collection. Id., at 870. The
District Court’s explanation as to why speaks for itself: “Although
there are significant socioeconomic disparities between minorities
and non-minorities in Arizona, these disparities are an imprecise
proxy for disparities in ballot collection use. Plaintiffs do not
argue that all or even most socioeconomically disadvantaged voters
use ballot collection services, nor does the evidence support such
a finding. Rather, the anecdotal estimates from individual ballot
collectors indicate that a relatively small number of voters have
used ballot collection services in past elections.” Ibid. ;
see also id., at 881 (“[B]allot collection was used as a
[get-out-the-vote] strategy in mostly low-efficacy minority
communities, though the Court cannot say how often voters used
ballot collection, nor can it measure the degree or significance
of any disparities in its usage ” (emphasis
added)). 20 See
Blinder, Election Fraud in North Carolina Leads to New Charges for
Republican Operative, N. Y. Times, July 30, 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/mccrae-dowless-indictment.html;
Graham, North Carolina Had No Choice, The Atlantic, Feb. 22, 2019,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/north-carolina-9th-fraud-board-orders-new-election/583369/. 21 The
dissent’s primary argument regarding HB 2023 concerns its effect on
Native Americans who live on remote reservations. The dissent notes
that many of these voters do not receive mail delivery at home,
that the nearest post office may be some distance from their homes,
and that they may not have automobiles. Post, at 36. We do
not dismiss these problems, but for a number of reasons, they do
not provide a basis for invalidating HB 2023. The burdens that fall
on remote communities are mitigated by the long period of time
prior to an election during which a vote may be cast either in
person or by mail and by the legality of having a ballot picked up
and mailed by family or household members. And in this suit, no
individual voter testified that HB 2023 would make it significantly
more difficult for him or her to vote. 329 F. Supp. 3d, at
871. Moreover, the Postal Service is required by law to “provide a
maximum degree of effective and regular postal services to rural
areas, communities, and small towns where post offices are not
self-sustaining.” 39 U. S. C. §101(b); see also
§403(b)(3). Small post offices may not be closed “solely for
operating at a deficit,” §101(b), and any decision to close or
consolidate a post office may be appealed to the Postal Regulatory
Commission, see §404(d)(5). An alleged failure by the Postal
Service to comply with its statutory obligations in a particular
location does not in itself provide a ground for overturning a
voting rule that applies throughout an entire State. 22 The
District Court also noted prior attempts on the part of the Arizona
Legislature to regulate or limit third-party ballot collection in
2011 and 2013. It reasonably concluded that any procedural
irregularities in those attempts had less probative value for
inferring the purpose behind HB 2023 because the bills were passed
“during different legislative sessions by a substantially different
composition of legislators.” 329 F. Supp. 3d, at
881. SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

															_________________

															Nos. 19–1257 and 19–1258

															_________________

															MARK BRNOVICH, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF
ARIZONA, et al., PETITIONERS

															19–1257 v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE,
et al.

															ARIZONA REPUBLICAN PARTY, et al.,
PETITIONERS

															19–1258 v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE,
et al.

															on writs of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the ninth circuit

															[July 1, 2021]

															Justice Gorsuch, with whom Justice Thomas
joins, concurring.

															I join the Court’s opinion in full, but flag one
thing it does not decide. Our cases have assumed—without
deciding—that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 furnishes an implied
cause of action under §2. See Mobile v. Bolden , 446 U.S.
55 , 60, and n. 8 (1980) (plurality opinion). Lower courts
have treated this as an open question. E.g., Washington v. Finlay , 664 F.2d 913, 926 (CA4 1981).
Because no party argues that the plaintiffs lack a cause of action
here, and because the existence (or not) of a cause of action does
not go to a court’s subject-matter jurisdiction, see Reyes
Mata v. Lynch , 576 U.S. 143, 150 (2015), this Court need
not and does not address that issue today. SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

															_________________

															Nos. 19–1257 and 19–1258

															_________________

															MARK BRNOVICH, ATTORNEY GENERAL OF
ARIZONA, et al., PETITIONERS

															19–1257 v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE,
et al.

															ARIZONA REPUBLICAN PARTY, et al.,
PETITIONERS

															19–1258 v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE,
et al.

															on writs of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the ninth circuit

															[July 1, 2021]

															Justice Kagan, with whom Justice Breyer and
Justice Sotomayor join, dissenting.

															If a single statute represents the best of
America, it is the Voting Rights Act. It marries two great ideals:
democracy and racial equality. And it dedicates our country to
carrying them out. Section 2, the provision at issue here,
guarantees that members of every racial group will have equal
voting opportunities. Citizens of every race will have the same
shot to participate in the political process and to elect
representatives of their choice. They will all own our democracy
together—no one more and no one less than any other.

															If a single statute reminds us of the worst of
America, it is the Voting Rights Act. Because it was—and remains—so
necessary. Because a century after the Civil War was fought, at the
time of the Act’s passage, the promise of political equality
remained a distant dream for African American citizens. Because
States and localities continually “contriv[ed] new rules,” mostly
neutral on their face but discriminatory in operation, to keep
minority voters from the polls. South Carolina v. Katzenbach , 383 U.S.
301 , 335 (1966). Because “Congress had reason to suppose” that
States would “try similar maneuvers in the future”—“pour[ing] old
poison into new bottles” to suppress minority votes. Ibid .; Reno v. Bossier Parish School Bd ., 528 U.S.
320 , 366 (2000) (Souter, J., concurring in part and dissenting
in part). Because Congress has been proved right.

															The Voting Rights Act is ambitious, in both goal
and scope. When President Lyndon Johnson sent the bill to Congress,
ten days after John Lewis led marchers across the Edmund Pettus
Bridge, he explained that it was “carefully drafted to meet its
objective—the end of discrimination in voting in America.”
H. R. Doc. No. 120, 89th Cong., 1st Sess., 1–2 (1965). He was
right about how the Act’s drafting reflected its aim. “The end of
discrimination in voting” is a far-reaching goal. And the Voting
Rights Act’s text is just as far-reaching. A later amendment,
adding the provision at issue here, became necessary when this
Court construed the statute too narrowly. And in the last decade,
this Court assailed the Act again, undoing its vital Section 5. See Shelby County v. Holder , 570
U.S. 529 (2013). But Section 2 of the Act remains, as written,
as expansive as ever—demanding that every citizen of this country
possess a right at once grand and obvious: the right to an equal
opportunity to vote.

															Today, the Court undermines Section 2 and the
right it provides. The majority fears that the statute Congress
wrote is too “radical”—that it will invalidate too many state
voting laws. See ante , at 21, 25. So the majority writes its
own set of rules, limiting Section 2 from multiple directions. See ante , at 16–19. Wherever it can, the majority gives a
cramped reading to broad language. And then it uses that reading to
uphold two election laws from Arizona that discriminate against
minority voters. I could say—and will in the following pages—that
this is not how the Court is supposed to interpret and apply
statutes. But that ordinary critique woefully undersells the
problem. What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again)
rewritten—in order to weaken—a statute that stands as a monument to
America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. What
is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring
about “the end of discrimination in voting.” I respectfully
dissent.

															I

															The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is an
extraordinary law. Rarely has a statute required so much sacrifice
to ensure its passage. Never has a statute done more to advance the
Nation’s highest ideals. And few laws are more vital in the current
moment. Yet in the last decade, this Court has treated no statute
worse. To take the measure of today’s harm, a look to the Act’s
past must come first. The idea is not to recount, as the majority
hurriedly does, some bygone era of voting discrimination. See ante , at 2–3. It is instead to describe the electoral
practices that the Act targets—and to show the high stakes of the
present controversy.

															A

															Democratic ideals in America got off to a
glorious start; democratic practice not so much. The Declaration of
Independence made an awe-inspiring promise: to institute a
government “deriving [its] just powers from the consent of the
governed.” But for most of the Nation’s first century, that pledge
ran to white men only. The earliest state election laws excluded
from the franchise African Americans, Native Americans, women, and
those without property. See A. Keyssar, The Right To Vote: The
Contested History of Democracy in the United States 8–21, 54–60
(2000). In 1855, on the precipice of the Civil War, only five
States permitted African Americans to vote. Id ., at 55. And
at the federal level, our Court’s most deplorable holding made sure
that no black people could enter the voting booth. See Dred
Scott v. Sandford , 19 How. 393 (1857).

															But the “American ideal of political equality
. . . could not forever tolerate the limitation of the
right to vote” to whites only. Mobile v. Bolden , 446 U.S.
55 , 103–104 (1980) (Marshall, J., dissenting). And a civil war,
dedicated to ensuring “government of the people, by the people, for
the people,” brought constitutional change. In 1870, after a
hard-fought battle over ratification, the Fifteenth Amendment
carried the Nation closer to its founding aspirations. “The right
of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or
abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race,
color, or previous condition of servitude.” Those words promised to
enfranchise millions of black citizens who only a decade earlier
had been slaves. Frederick Douglass held that the Amendment “means
that we are placed upon an equal footing with all other men”—that
with the vote, “liberty is to be the right of all.” 4 The Frederick
Douglass Papers 270–271 (J. Blassingame & J. McKivigan eds.
1991). President Grant had seen much blood spilled in the Civil
War; now he spoke of the fruits of that sacrifice. In a
self-described “unusual” message to Congress, he heralded the
Fifteenth Amendment as “a measure of grander importance than any
other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free
Government”—as “the most important event that has occurred since
the nation came into life.” Ulysses S. Grant, Message to the Senate
and House of Representatives (Mar. 30, 1870), in 7 Compilation of
the Messages and Papers of the Presidents 1789–1897, pp. 55–56
(J. Richardson ed. 1898).

															Momentous as the Fifteenth Amendment was,
celebration of its achievements soon proved premature. The
Amendment’s guarantees “quickly became dead letters in much of the
country.” Foner, The Strange Career of the Reconstruction
Amendments, 108 Yale L. J. 2003, 2007 (1999). African
Americans daring to go to the polls often “met with coordinated
intimidation and violence.” Northwest Austin Municipal Util . Dist . No . One v. Holder , 557 U.S.
193 , 218–219 (2009) (Thomas, J., concurring in judgment in part
and dissenting in part). And almost immediately, legislators
discovered that bloodless actions could also suffice to limit the
electorate to white citizens. Many States, especially in the South,
suppressed the black vote through a dizzying array of methods:
literacy tests, poll taxes, registration requirements, and property
qualifications. See Katzenbach , 383 U. S., at 310–312.
Most of those laws, though facially neutral, gave enough discretion
to election officials to prevent significant effects on poor or
uneducated whites. The idea, as one Virginia representative put it,
was “to disfranchise every negro that [he] could disfranchise,” and
“as few white people as possible.” Keyssar 113. Decade after decade
after decade, election rules blocked African Americans—and in some
States, Hispanics and Native Americans too—from making use of the
ballot. See Oregon v. Mitchell , 400 U.S.
112 , 132 (1970) (opinion of Black, J.) (discussing treatment of
non-black groups). By 1965, only 27% of black Georgians, 19% of
black Alabamians, and 7%—yes, 7%—of black Mississippians were
registered to vote. See C. Bullock, R. Gaddie, & J. Wert, The
Rise and Fall of the Voting Rights Act 23 (2016).

															The civil rights movement, and the events of a
single Bloody Sunday, created pressure for change. Selma was the
heart of an Alabama county whose 15,000 black citizens included, in
1961, only 156 on the voting rolls. See D. Garrow, Protest at Selma
31 (1978). In the first days of 1965, the city became the epicenter
of demonstrations meant to force Southern election officials to
register African American voters. As weeks went by without results,
organizers announced a march from Selma to Birmingham. On March 7,
some 600 protesters, led by future Congressman John Lewis, sought
to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. State troopers in riot gear
responded brutally: “Turning their nightsticks horizontally, they
rushed into the crowd, knocking people over like bowling pins.” G.
May, Bending Toward Justice 87 (2013). Then came men on horseback,
“swinging their clubs and ropes like cowboys driving cattle to
market.” Ibid . The protestors were beaten, knocked
unconscious, and bloodied. Lewis’s skull was fractured. “I thought
I was going to die on this bridge,” he later recalled. Rojas, Selma
Helped Define John Lewis’s Life, N. Y. Times, July 28,
2020.

															A galvanized country responded. Ten days after
the Selma march, President Johnson wrote to Congress proposing
legislation to “help rid the Nation of racial discrimination in
every aspect of the electoral process and thereby insure the right
of all to vote.” H. R. Doc. No. 120, at 1. (To his attorney
general, Johnson was still more emphatic: “I want you to write the
goddamnedest toughest voting rights act that you can devise.” H.
Raines, My Soul Is Rested 337 (1983).) And in August 1965, after
the bill’s supporters overcame a Senate filibuster, Johnson signed
the Voting Rights Act into law. Echoing Grant’s description of the
Fifteenth Amendment, Johnson called the statute “one of the most
monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom.” Public
Papers of the Presidents, Lyndon B. Johnson, Vol. 2, Aug. 6, 1965,
p. 841 (1966) (Johnson Papers).

															“After a century’s failure to fulfill the
promise” of the Fifteenth Amendment, “passage of the VRA finally
led to signal improvement.” Shelby County , 570 U. S.,
at 562 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting). In the five years after the
statute’s passage, almost as many African Americans registered to
vote in six Southern States as in the entire century before 1965.
See Davidson, The Voting Rights Act: A Brief History, in
Controversies in Minority Voting 21 (B. Grofman & C. Davidson
eds. 1992). The crudest attempts to block voting access, like
literacy tests and poll taxes, disappeared. Legislatures often
replaced those vote denial schemes with new measures—mostly to do
with districting—designed to dilute the impact of minority votes.
But the Voting Rights Act, operating for decades at full strength,
stopped many of those measures too. See, e . g ., Chisom v. Roemer , 501 U.S.
380 (1991); Allen v. State Bd . of
Elections , 393 U.S.
544 (1969). As a famed dissent assessed the situation about a
half-century after the statute’s enactment: The Voting Rights Act
had become “one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply
justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s
history.” Shelby County , 570 U. S., at 562 (Ginsburg,
J., dissenting).[ 1 ]

															B

															Yet efforts to suppress the minority vote
continue. No one would know this from reading the majority opinion.
It hails the “good news” that legislative efforts had mostly
shifted by the 1980s from vote denial to vote dilution. Ante , at 7. And then it moves on to other matters, as though
the Voting Rights Act no longer has a problem to address—as though
once literacy tests and poll taxes disappeared, so too did efforts
to curb minority voting. But as this Court recognized about a
decade ago, “racial discrimination and racially polarized voting
are not ancient history.” Bartlett v. Strickland , 556 U.S.
1 , 25 (2009). Indeed, the problem of voting discrimination has
become worse since that time—in part because of what this Court did
in Shelby County . Weaken the Voting Rights Act, and
predictable consequences follow: yet a further generation of voter
suppression laws.

															Much of the Voting Rights Act’s success lay in
its capacity to meet ever-new forms of discrimination. Experience
showed that “[w]henever one form of voting discrimination was
identified and prohibited, others sprang up in its place.” Shelby County , 570 U. S., at 560 (Ginsburg, J.,
dissenting). Combating those efforts was like “battling the
Hydra”—or to use a less cultured reference, like playing a game of
whack-a-mole. Ibid . So Congress, in Section 5 of the Act,
gave the Department of Justice authority to review all new rules
devised by jurisdictions with a history of voter suppression—and to
block any that would have discriminatory effects. See 52
U. S. C. §§10304(a)–(b). In that way, the Act would
prevent the use of new, more nuanced methods to restrict the voting
opportunities of non-white citizens.

															And for decades, Section 5 operated as intended.
Between 1965 and 2006, the Department stopped almost 1200 voting
laws in covered areas from taking effect. See Shelby County ,
570 U. S., at 571 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting). Some of those
laws used districting to dilute minority voting strength—making
sure that the votes of minority citizens would carry less weight
than the votes of whites in electing candidates. Other laws, even
if facially neutral, disproportionately curbed the ability of
non-white citizens to cast a ballot at all. So, for example, a
jurisdiction might require forms of identification that those
voters were less likely to have; or it might limit voting places
and times convenient for those voters; or it might purge its voter
rolls through mechanisms especially likely to ensnare them. See id ., at 574–575. In reviewing mountains of such evidence in
2006, Congress saw a continuing need for Section 5. Although
“discrimination today is more subtle than the visible methods used
in 1965,” Congress found, it still produces “the same [effects],
namely a diminishing of the minority community’s ability to fully
participate in the electoral process.” H. R. Rep. No. 109–478,
p. 6 (2006). Congress thus reauthorized the preclearance
scheme for 25 years.

															But this Court took a different view. Finding
that “[o]ur country has changed,” the Court saw only limited
instances of voting discrimination—and so no further need for
preclearance. Shelby County , 570 U. S., at 547–549,
557. Displacing Congress’s contrary judgment, the Court struck down
the coverage formula essential to the statute’s operation. The
legal analysis offered was perplexing: The Court based its decision
on a “principle of equal [state] sovereignty” that a prior decision
of ours had rejected—and that has not made an appearance since. Id ., at 544 (majority opinion); see id ., at 587–588
(Ginsburg, J., dissenting). Worse yet was the Court’s blithe
confidence in assessing what was needed and what was not. “[T]hings
have changed dramatically,” the Court reiterated, id ., at
547: The statute that was once a necessity had become an
imposition. But how did the majority know there was nothing more
for Section 5 to do—that the (undoubted) changes in the country
went so far as to make the provision unnecessary? It didn’t, as
Justice Ginsburg explained in dissent. The majority’s faith that
discrimination was almost gone derived, at least in part, from the
success of Section 5—from its record of blocking discriminatory
voting schemes. Discarding Section 5 because those schemes had
diminished was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm
because you are not getting wet.” Id ., at 590.

															The rashness of the act soon became evident.
Once Section 5’s strictures came off, States and localities put in
place new restrictive voting laws, with foreseeably adverse effects
on minority voters. On the very day Shelby County issued,
Texas announced that it would implement a strict
voter-identification requirement that had failed to clear Section
5. See Elmendorf & Spencer, Administering Section 2 of the
Voting Rights Act After Shelby County , 115 Colum. L. Rev.
2143, 2145–2146 (2015). Other States—Alabama, Virginia,
Mississippi—fell like dominoes, adopting measures similarly
vulnerable to preclearance review. See ibid . The North
Carolina Legislature, starting work the day after Shelby
County , enacted a sweeping election bill eliminating same-day
registration, forbidding out-of-precinct voting, and reducing early
voting, including souls-to-the-polls Sundays. (That law went too
far even without Section 5: A court struck it down because the
State’s legislators had a racially discriminatory purpose. North
Carolina State Conference of NAACP v. McCrory , 831 F.3d
204 (CA4 2016).) States and localities redistricted—drawing new
boundary lines or replacing neighborhood-based seats with at-large
seats—in ways guaranteed to reduce minority representation. See
Elmendorf, 115 Colum. L. Rev., at 2146. And jurisdictions closed
polling places in mostly minority areas, enhancing an already
pronounced problem. See Brief for Leadership Conference on Civil
and Human Rights et al. as Amici Curiae 14–15 (listing
closure schemes); Pettigrew, The Racial Gap in Wait Times, 132 Pol.
Sci. Q. 527, 527 (2017) (finding that lines in minority precincts
are twice as long as in white ones, and that a minority voter is
six times more likely to wait more than an hour).[ 2 ]

															And that was just the first wave of
post- Shelby County laws. In recent months, State after State
has taken up or enacted legislation erecting new barriers to
voting. See Brennan Center for Justice, Voting Laws Roundup: May
2021 (online source archived at www.supremecourt.gov) (compiling
legislation). Those laws shorten the time polls are open, both on
Election Day and before. They impose new prerequisites to voting by
mail, and shorten the windows to apply for and return mail ballots.
They make it harder to register to vote, and easier to purge voters
from the rolls. Two laws even ban handing out food or water to
voters standing in line. Some of those restrictions may be lawful
under the Voting Rights Act. But chances are that some have the
kind of impact the Act was designed to prevent—that they make the
political process less open to minority voters than to others.

															So the Court decides this Voting Rights Act case
at a perilous moment for the Nation’s commitment to equal
citizenship. It decides this case in an era of voting-rights
retrenchment—when too many States and localities are restricting
access to voting in ways that will predictably deprive members of
minority groups of equal access to the ballot box. If “any racial
discrimination in voting is too much,” as the Shelby County Court recited, then the Act still has much to do. 570 U. S.,
at 557. Or more precisely, the fraction of the Act remaining—the
Act as diminished by the Court’s hand. Congress never meant for
Section 2 to bear all of the weight of the Act’s commitments. That
provision looks to courts, not to the Executive Branch, to restrain
discriminatory voting practices. And litigation is an
after-the-fact remedy, incapable of providing relief until an
election—usually, more than one election—has come and gone. See id ., at 572 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting). So Section 2 was
supposed to be a back-up, for all its sweep and power. But after Shelby County , the vitality of Section 2—a “permanent,
nationwide ban on racial discrimination in voting”—matters more
than ever. Id ., at 557 (majority opinion). For after Shelby County , Section 2 is what voters have left.

															II

															Section 2, as drafted, is well-equipped to
meet the challenge. Congress meant to eliminate all “discriminatory
election systems or practices which operate, designedly or
otherwise, to minimize or cancel out the voting strength and
political effectiveness of minority groups.” S. Rep. No. 97–417,
p. 28 (1982) (S. Rep.). And that broad intent is manifest
in the provision’s broad text. As always, this Court’s task is to
read that language as Congress wrote it—to give the section all the
scope and potency Congress drafted it to have. So I start by
showing how Section 2’s text requires courts to eradicate voting
practices that make it harder for members of some races than of
others to cast a vote, unless such a practice is necessary to
support a strong state interest. I then show how far from that text
the majority strays. Its analysis permits exactly the kind of vote
suppression that Section 2, by its terms, rules out of bounds.

															A

															Section 2, as relevant here, has two
interlocking parts. Subsection (a) states the law’s basic
prohibition:

															“No voting qualification or prerequisite
to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or
applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner 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.” 52
U. S. C. §10301(a).

															Subsection (b) then tells courts how to apply
that bar—or otherwise said, when to find that an infringement of
the voting right has occurred:

															“A violation of subsection (a) is
established if, 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 given race] in that [those] members
have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to
participate in the political process and to elect representatives
of their choice.” §10301(b).[ 3 ]

															Those provisions have a great many words, and I
address them further below. But their essential import is plain:
Courts are to strike down voting rules that contribute to a racial
disparity in the opportunity to vote, taking all the relevant
circumstances into account.

															The first thing to note about Section 2 is how
far its prohibitory language sweeps. The provision bars any “voting
qualification,” any “prerequisite to voting,” or any “standard,
practice, or procedure” that “results in a denial or abridgement of
the right” to “vote on account of race.” The overlapping list of
covered state actions makes clear that Section 2 extends to every
kind of voting or election rule. Congress carved out nothing
pertaining to “voter qualifications or the manner in which
elections are conducted.” Holder v. Hall , 512 U.S.
874 , 922 (1994) (Thomas, J., concurring in judgment). So, for
example, the provision “covers all manner of registration
requirements, the practices surrounding registration,” the
“locations of polling places, the times polls are open, the use of
paper ballots as opposed to voting machines, and other similar
aspects of the voting process that might be manipulated to deny any
citizen the right to cast a ballot and have it properly counted.” Ibid . All those rules and more come within the statute—so
long as they result in a race-based “denial or abridgement” of the
voting right. And the “denial or abridgement” phrase speaks broadly
too. “[A]bridgment necessarily means something more subtle and less
drastic than the complete denial of the right to cast a ballot,
denial being separately forbidden.” Bossier , 528 U. S.,
at 359 (Souter, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). It
means to “curtail,” rather than take away, the voting right.
American Heritage Dictionary 4 (1969).

															The “results in” language, connecting the
covered voting rules to the prohibited voting abridgement, tells
courts that they are to focus on the law’s effects. Rather than
hinge liability on state officials’ motives, Congress made it ride
on their actions’ consequences. That decision was as considered as
considered comes. This Court, as the majority notes, had construed
the original Section 2 to apply to facially neutral voting
practices “only if [they were] motivated by a discriminatory
purpose.” Bolden , 446 U. S., at 62; see ante , at
5. Congress enacted the current Section 2 to reverse that
outcome—to make clear that “results” alone could lead to liability.
An intent test, the Senate Report explained, “asks the wrong
question.” S. Rep., at 36. If minority citizens “are denied a fair
opportunity to participate,” then “the system should be changed,
regardless of ” what “motives were in an official’s mind.” Ibid . Congress also saw an intent test as imposing “an
inordinately difficult burden for plaintiffs.” Ibid . Even if
state actors had purposefully discriminated, they would likely be
“ab[le] to offer a non-racial rationalization,” supported by “a
false trail” of “official resolutions” and “other legislative
history eschewing any racial motive.” Id ., at 37. So only a
results-focused statute could prevent States from finding ways to
abridge minority citizens’ voting rights.

															But when to conclude—looking to effects, not
purposes—that a denial or abridgment has occurred? Again, answering
that question is subsection (b)’s function. See supra , at
12–13. It teaches that a violation is established when, “based on
the totality of circumstances,” a State’s electoral system is “not
equally open” to members of a racial group. And then the subsection
tells us what that means. A system is not equally open if members
of one race have “less opportunity” than others to cast votes, to
participate in politics, or to elect representatives. The key
demand, then, is for equal political opportunity across races.

															That equal “opportunity” is absent when a law or
practice makes it harder for members of one racial group, than for
others, to cast ballots. When Congress amended Section 2, the word
“opportunity” meant what it also does today: “a favorable or
advantageous combination of circumstances” for some action. See
American Heritage Dictionary, at 922. In using that word, Congress
made clear that the Voting Rights Act does not demand equal
outcomes. If members of different races have the same opportunity
to vote, but go to the ballot box at different rates, then so be
it—that is their preference, and Section 2 has nothing to say. But
if a law produces different voting opportunities across races—if it
establishes rules and conditions of political participation that
are less favorable (or advantageous) for one racial group than for
others—then Section 2 kicks in. It applies, in short, whenever the
law makes it harder for citizens of one race than of others to cast
a vote.[ 4 ]

															And that is so even if (as is usually true) the
law does not single out any race, but instead is facially neutral.
Suppose, as Justice Scalia once did, that a county has a law
limiting “voter registration [to] only three hours one day a week.” Chisom , 501 U. S., at 408 (dissenting opinion). And
suppose that policy makes it “more difficult for blacks to register
than whites”—say, because the jobs African Americans
disproportionately hold make it harder to take time off in that
window. Ibid . Those citizens, Justice Scalia concluded,
would then “have less opportunity ‘to participate in the political
process’ than whites, and §2 would therefore be violated.” Ibid . (emphasis deleted). In enacting Section 2, Congress
documented many similar (if less extreme) facially neutral
rules—“registration requirements,” “voting and registration hours,”
voter “purging” policies, and so forth—that create disparities in
voting opportunities. S. Rep., at 10, n. 22; H. R. Rep.
No. 97–227, pp. 11–17 (1981) (H. R. Rep.). Those laws,
Congress thought, would violate Section 2, though they were not
facially discriminatory, because they gave voters of different
races unequal access to the political process.

															Congress also made plain, in calling for a
totality-of- circumstances inquiry, that equal voting opportunity
is a function of both law and background conditions—in other words,
that a voting rule’s validity depends on how the rule operates in
conjunction with facts on the ground. “[T]otality review,” this
Court has explained, stems from Congress’s recognition of “the
demonstrated ingenuity of state and local governments in hobbling
minority voting power.” Johnson v. De Grandy , 512 U.S.
997 , 1018 (1994). Sometimes, of course, state actions overtly
target a single race: For example, Congress was acutely aware, in
amending Section 2, of the elimination of polling places in African
American neighborhoods. See S. Rep., at 10, 11, and
n. 22; H. R. Rep., at 17, 35. But sometimes government
officials enact facially neutral laws that leverage—and become
discriminatory by dint of—pre-existing social and economic
conditions. The classic historical cases are literacy tests and
poll taxes. A more modern example is the one Justice Scalia gave,
of limited registration hours. Congress knew how those laws worked:
It saw that “inferior education, poor employment opportunities, and
low incomes”—all conditions often correlated with race—could turn
even an ordinary-seeming election rule into an effective barrier to
minority voting in certain circumstances. Thornburg v. Gingles , 478 U.S.
30 , 69 (1986) (plurality opinion). So Congress demanded, as
this Court has recognized, “an intensely local appraisal” of a
rule’s impact—“a searching practical evaluation of the ‘past and
present reality.’ ” Id ., at 79; De Grandy , 512
U. S., at 1018 (quoting S. Rep., at 30). “The essence of
a §2 claim,” we have said, is that an election law “interacts with
social and historical conditions” in a particular place to cause
race-based inequality in voting opportunity. Gingles , 478
U. S., at 47 (majority opinion). That interaction is what the
totality inquiry is mostly designed to discover.

															At the same time, the totality inquiry enables
courts to take into account strong state interests supporting an
election rule. An all-things-considered inquiry, we have explained,
is by its nature flexible. See De Grandy , 512 U. S., at
1018. On the one hand, it allows no “safe harbor[s]” for election
rules resulting in discrimination. Ibid . On the other hand,
it precludes automatic condemnation of those rules. Among the
“balance of considerations” a court is to weigh is a State’s need
for the challenged policy. Houston Lawyers’ Assn . v. Attorney General of Tex ., 501 U.S.
419 , 427 (1991). But in making that assessment of state
interests, a court must keep in mind—just as Congress did—the ease
of “offer[ing] a non-racial rationalization” for even blatantly
discriminatory laws. S. Rep., at 37; see supra , at 14. State
interests do not get accepted on faith. And even a genuine and
strong interest will not suffice if a plaintiff can prove that it
can be accomplished in a less discriminatory way. As we have put
the point before: When a less racially biased law would not
“significantly impair[ ] the State’s interest,” the
discriminatory election rule must fall. Houston Lawyers’
Assn ., 501 U. S., at 428.[ 5 ]

															So the text of Section 2, as applied in our
precedents, tells us the following, every part of which speaks to
the ambition of Congress’s action. Section 2 applies to any voting
rule, of any kind. The provision prohibits not just the denial but
also the abridgment of a citizen’s voting rights on account of
race. The inquiry is focused on effects: It asks not about why
state officials enacted a rule, but about whether that rule results
in racial discrimination. The discrimination that is of concern is
inequality of voting opportunity. That kind of discrimination can
arise from facially neutral (not just targeted) rules. There is a
Section 2 problem when an election rule, operating against the
backdrop of historical, social, and economic conditions, makes it
harder for minority citizens than for others to cast ballots. And
strong state interests may save an otherwise discriminatory rule,
but only if that rule is needed to achieve them—that is, only if a
less discriminatory rule will not attain the State’s goal.

															That is a lot of law to apply in a Section 2
case. Real law—the kind created by Congress. (A strange thing, to
hear about it all only in a dissent.)[ 6 ] None of this law threatens to “take down,” as the
majority charges, the mass of state and local election rules. Ante , at 25. Here is the flipside of what I have said above,
now from the plaintiff ’s perspective: Section 2 demands proof
of a statistically significant racial disparity in electoral
opportunities (not outcomes) resulting from a law not needed to
achieve a government’s legitimate goals. That showing is hardly
insubstantial; and as a result, Section 2 vote denial suits do not
often succeed (even with lower courts applying the law as written,
not the majority’s new, concocted version). See Brief for State and
Local Election Officials as Amici Curiae 15 (finding only
nine winning cases since Shelby County , each involving “an
intensely local appraisal” of a “controversial polic[y] in specific
places”). But Section 2 was indeed meant to do something
important—crucial to the operation of our democracy. The provision
tells courts—however “radical” the majority might find the idea, ante , at 25—to eliminate facially neutral (as well as
targeted) electoral rules that unnecessarily create inequalities of
access to the political process. That is the very project of the
statute, as conceived and as written—and now as damaged by this
Court.

															B

															The majority’s opinion mostly inhabits a
law-free zone. It congratulates itself in advance for giving
Section 2’s text “careful consideration.” Ante , at 14. And
then it leaves that language almost wholly behind. See ante ,
at 14–21. (Every once in a while, when its lawmaking threatens to
leap off the page, it thinks to sprinkle in a few random statutory
words.) So too the majority barely mentions this Court’s precedents
construing Section 2’s text. On both those counts, you can see why.
As just described, Section 2’s language is broad. See supra ,
at 12–20. To read it fairly, then, is to read it broadly. And to
read it broadly is to do much that the majority is determined to
avoid. So the majority ignores the sweep of Section 2’s prohibitory
language. It fails to note Section 2’s application to every
conceivable kind of voting rule. It neglects to address the
provision’s concern with how those rules may “abridge[ ],” not
just deny, minority citizens’ voting rights. It declines to
consider Congress’s use of an effects test, rather than a purpose
test, to assess the rules’ legality. Nor does the majority
acknowledge the force of Section 2’s implementing provision. The
majority says as little as possible about what it means for voting
to be “equally open,” or for voters to have an equal “opportunity”
to cast a ballot. See ante , at 14–15. It only grudgingly
accepts—and then apparently forgets—that the provision applies to
facially neutral laws with discriminatory consequences. Compare ante , at 22, with ante , at 25. And it hints that as
long as a voting system is sufficiently “open,” it need not be
equally so. See ante , at 16, 18. In sum, the majority skates
over the strong words Congress drafted to accomplish its equally
strong purpose: ensuring that minority citizens can access the
electoral system as easily as whites.[ 7 ]

															The majority instead founds its decision on a
list of mostly made-up factors, at odds with Section 2 itself. To
excuse this unusual free-form exercise, the majority notes that
Section 2 authorizes courts to conduct a “totality of
circumstances” analysis. Ante , at 16. But as described
above, Congress mainly added that language so that Section 2 could
protect against “the demonstrated ingenuity of state and local
governments in hobbling minority voting power.” De Grandy ,
512 U. S., at 1018; see supra , at 16–17. The totality
inquiry requires courts to explore how ordinary-seeming laws can
interact with local conditions—economic, social, historical—to
produce race-based voting inequalities. That inquiry hardly gives a
court the license to devise whatever limitations on Section 2’s
reach it would have liked Congress to enact. But that is the
license the majority takes. The “important circumstances” it
invents all cut in one direction—toward limiting liability for
race-based voting inequalities. Ante , at 16. (Indeed, the
majority gratuitously dismisses several factors that point the
opposite way. See ante , at 19–21.) Think of the majority’s
list as a set of extra-textual restrictions on Section 2—methods of
counteracting the law Congress actually drafted to achieve the
purposes Congress thought “important.” The list—not a test,
the majority hastens to assure us, with delusions of modesty—stacks
the deck against minority citizens’ voting rights. Never mind that
Congress drafted a statute to protect those rights—to prohibit any
number of schemes the majority’s non-test test makes it possible to
save.

															Start with the majority’s first idea: a “[m]ere
inconvenience[ ]” exception to Section 2. Ante , at 16.
Voting, the majority says, imposes a set of “usual burdens”: Some
time, some travel, some rule compliance. Ibid . And all of
that is beneath the notice of Section 2—even if those burdens fall
highly unequally on members of different races. See ibid .
But that categorical exclusion, for seemingly small (or “[un]usual”
or “[un]serious”) burdens, is nowhere in the provision’s text. To
the contrary (and as this Court has recognized before), Section 2
allows no “safe harbor[s]” for election rules resulting in
disparate voting opportunities. De Grandy , 512 U. S.,
at 1018; see supra , at 17. The section applies to any discriminatory “voting qualification,” “prerequisite to voting,” or
“standard, practice, or procedure”—even the kind creating only
(what the majority thinks of as) an ordinary burden. And the
section cares about any race-based “abridgments” of voting,
not just measures that come near to preventing that activity.
Congress, recall, was intent on eradicating the “subtle, as well as
the obvious,” ways of suppressing minority voting. Allen ,
393 U. S., at 565; see supra , at 14. One of those more
subtle ways is to impose “inconveniences,” especially a collection
of them, differentially affecting members of one race. The certain
result—because every inconvenience makes voting both somewhat more
difficult and somewhat less likely—will be to deter minority votes.
In countenancing such an election system, the majority departs from
Congress’s vision, set down in text, of ensuring equal voting
opportunity. It chooses equality-lite.

															And what is a “mere inconvenience” or “usual
burden” anyway? The drafters of the Voting Rights Act understood
that “social and historical conditions,” including disparities in
education, wealth, and employment, often affect opportunities to
vote. Gingles , 478 U. S., at 47; see supra , at
16–17. What does not prevent one citizen from casting a vote might
prevent another. How is a judge supposed to draw an “inconvenience”
line in some reasonable place, taking those differences into
account? Consider a law banning the handing out of water to voters.
No more than—or not even—an inconvenience when lines are short; but
what of when they are, as in some neighborhoods, hours-long? The
point here is that judges lack an objective way to decide which
voting obstacles are “mere” and which are not, for all voters at
all times. And so Section 2 does not ask the question.

															The majority’s “multiple ways to vote” factor is
similarly flawed. Ante , at 18. True enough, a State with
three ways to vote (say, on Election Day; early in person; or by
mail) may be more “open” than a State with only one (on Election
Day). And some other statute might care about that. But Section 2
does not. What it cares about is that a State’s “political
processes” are “ equally open” to voters of all races. And a
State’s electoral process is not equally open if, for example, the
State “only” makes Election Day voting by members of one race
peculiarly difficult. The House Report on Section 2 addresses that
issue. It explains that an election system would violate Section 2
if minority citizens had a lesser opportunity than white citizens
to use absentee ballots. See H. R. Rep., at 31, n. 106.
Even if the minority citizens could just as easily vote in person,
the scheme would “result in unequal access to the political
process.” Id ., at 31. That is not some piece of contestable
legislative history. It is the only reading of Section 2 possible,
given the statute’s focus on equality. Maybe the majority does not
mean to contest that proposition; its discussion of this supposed
factor is short and cryptic. But if the majority does intend to
excuse so much discrimination, it is wrong. Making one method of
voting less available to minority citizens than to whites
necessarily means giving the former “less opportunity than other
members of the electorate to participate in the political process.”
§10301(b).

															The majority’s history-and-commonality factor
also pushes the inquiry away from what the statute demands. The
oddest part of the majority’s analysis is the idea that “what was
standard practice when §2 was amended in 1982 is a relevant
consideration.” Ante , at 16. The 1982 state of the world is
no part of the Section 2 test. An election rule prevalent at that
time may make voting harder for minority than for white citizens;
Section 2 then covers such a rule, as it covers any other. And
contrary to the majority’s unsupported speculation, Congress
“intended” exactly that. Ante , at 17; see H. R. Rep.,
at 14 (explaining that the Act aimed to eradicate the
“numerous practices and procedures which act as continued barriers
to registration and voting”).[ 8 ] Section 2 was meant to disrupt the status quo, not to
preserve it—to eradicate then-current discriminatory practices, not
to set them in amber. See Bossier , 528 U. S., at 334
(under Section 2, “[i]f the status quo ” abridges the right
to vote “relative to what the right to vote ought to be , the
status quo itself must be changed”).[ 9 ] And as to election rules common now, the majority
oversimplifies. Even if those rules are unlikely to violate Section
2 everywhere, they may easily do so somewhere. That is because the
demographics and political geography of States vary widely and
Section 2’s application depends on place-specific facts. As we have
recognized, the statute calls for “an intensely local appraisal,”
not a count-up-the-States exercise. Gingles , 478 U. S.,
at 79; see supra , at 17. This case, as I’ll later discuss,
offers a perfect illustration of how the difference between those
two approaches can matter. See infra , at 29–40.

															That leaves only the majority’s discussion of
state interests, which is again skewed so as to limit Section 2
liability. No doubt that under our precedent, a state interest in
an election rule “is a legitimate factor to be considered.” Houston Lawyers’ Assn ., 501 U. S., at 426. But the
majority wrongly dismisses the need for the closest possible fit
between means and end—that is, between the terms of the rule and
the State’s asserted interest. Ante , at 21. In the past,
this Court has stated that a discriminatory election rule must
fall, no matter how weighty the interest claimed, if a less biased
law would not “significantly impair[ that] interest.” Houston
Lawyers’ Assn ., 501 U. S., at 428; see supra , at
17–18, and n. 5. And as the majority concedes, we apply that kind
of means-end standard in every other context—employment, housing,
banking—where the law addresses racially discriminatory effects:
There, the rule must be “strict[ly] necess[ary]” to the interest. Ante , at 21; see, e . g ., Albemarle Paper
Co . v. Moody , 422 U.S.
405 , 425 (1975) (holding that an employment policy cannot stand
if another policy, “without a similarly undesirable racial effect,
would also serve the employer’s legitimate interest”). The majority
argues that “[t]he text of [those] provisions” differs from Section
2’s. Ante , at 20. But if anything, Section 2 gives less
weight to competing interests: Unlike in most discrimination laws,
they enter the inquiry only through the provision’s reference to
the “totality of circumstances”—through, then, a statutory
backdoor. So the majority falls back on the idea that “[d]emanding
such a tight fit would have the effect of invalidating a great many
neutral voting regulations.” Ante , at 21; see ante ,
at 25. But a state interest becomes relevant only when a voting
rule, even if neutral on its face, is found not neutral in
operation—only, that is, when the rule provides unequal access to
the political process. Apparently, the majority does not want to
“invalidate [too] many” of those actually discriminatory rules. But
Congress had a different goal in enacting Section 2.

															The majority’s approach, which would ask only
whether a discriminatory law “ reasonably pursue[s] important
state interests,” gives election officials too easy an escape from
Section 2. Ante , at 25 (emphasis added). Of course
preventing voter intimidation is an important state interest. And
of course preventing election fraud is the same. But those
interests are also easy to assert groundlessly or pretextually in
voting discrimination cases. Congress knew that when it passed
Section 2. Election officials can all too often, the Senate Report
noted, “offer a non-racial rationalization” for even laws that
“purposely discriminate[ ].” S. Rep., at 37; see supra , at 14, 17–18, and n. 5. A necessity test filters out
those offerings. See, e . g ., Albemarle , 422
U. S., at 425. It thereby prevents election officials from
flouting, circumventing, or discounting Section 2’s command not to
discriminate.

															In that regard, the past offers a lesson to the
present. Throughout American history, election officials have
asserted anti-fraud interests in using voter suppression laws. Poll
taxes, the classic mechanism to keep black people from voting, were
often justified as “preserv[ing] the purity of the ballot box [and]
facilitat[ing] honest elections.” J. Kousser, The Shaping of
Southern Politics 111, n. 9 (1974). A raft of election
regulations—including “elaborate registration procedures” and
“early poll closings”—similarly excluded white immigrants (Irish,
Italians, and so on) from the polls on the ground of “prevent[ing]
fraud and corruption.” Keyssar 159; see ibid . (noting that
in those times “claims of widespread corruption” were backed
“almost entirely” by “anecdotes [with] little systematic
investigation or evidence”). Take even the majority’s example of a
policy advancing an “important state interest”: “the use of private
voting booths,” in which voters marked their own ballots. Ante , at 19. In the majority’s high-minded account, that
innovation—then known as the Australian voting system, for the
country that introduced it—served entirely to prevent undue
influence. But when adopted, it also prevented many illiterate
citizens—especially African Americans—from voting. And indeed, that
was partly the point. As an 1892 Arkansas song went:

															The Australian Ballot works like a charm,

															It makes them think and scratch,

															And when a Negro gets a ballot

															He has certainly got his match.

															Kousser 54. Across the South, the Australian
ballot decreased voter participation among whites by anywhere from
8% to 28% but among African Americans by anywhere from 15% to 45%.
See id ., at 56. Does that mean secret ballot laws violate
Section 2 today? Of course not. But should the majority’s own
example give us all a bit of pause? Yes, it should. It serves as a
reminder that States have always found it natural to wrap
discriminatory policies in election-integrity garb.

															Congress enacted Section 2 to prevent those
maneuvers from working. It knew that States and localities had over
time enacted measure after measure imposing discriminatory voting
burdens. And it knew that governments were proficient in justifying
those measures on non-racial grounds. So Congress called a halt. It
enacted a statute that would strike down all unnecessary laws,
including facially neutral ones, that result in members of a racial
group having unequal access to the political process.

															But the majority is out of sympathy with that
measure. The majority thinks a statute that would remove those laws
is not, as Justice Ginsburg once called it, “consequential,
efficacious, and amply justified.” Shelby County , 570
U. S., at 562 (dissenting opinion). Instead, the majority
thinks it too “radical” to stomach. Ante , at 21, 25. The
majority objects to an excessive “transfer of the authority to set
voting rules from the States to the federal courts.” Ante ,
at 25. It even sees that transfer as “[un]democratic.” Ibid .
But maybe the majority should pay more attention to the “historical
background” that it insists “does not tell us how to decide this
case.” Ante , at 21. That history makes clear the
incongruity, in interpreting this statute, of the majority’s paean
to state authority—and conversely, its denigration of federal
responsibility for ensuring non-discriminatory voting rules. The
Voting Rights Act was meant to replace state and local election
rules that needlessly make voting harder for members of one race
than for others. The text of the Act perfectly reflects that
objective. The “democratic” principle it upholds is not one of
States’ rights as against federal courts. The democratic principle
it upholds is the right of every American, of every race, to have
equal access to the ballot box. The majority today undermines that
principle as it refuses to apply the terms of the statute. By
declaring some racially discriminatory burdens inconsequential, and
by refusing to subject asserted state interests to serious
means-end scrutiny, the majority enables voting discrimination.

															III

															Just look at Arizona. Two of that State’s
policies disproportionately affect minority citizens’ opportunity
to vote. The first—the out-of-precinct policy—results in Hispanic
and African American voters’ ballots being thrown out at a
statistically higher rate than those of whites. And whatever the
majority might say about the ordinariness of such a rule, Arizona
applies it in extra-ordinary fashion: Arizona is the national outlier in dealing with out-of-precinct votes, with the
next-worst offender nowhere in sight. The second rule—the
ballot-collection ban—makes voting meaningfully more difficult for
Native American citizens than for others. And nothing about how
that ban is applied is “usual” either—this time because of how many
of the State’s Native American citizens need to travel long
distances to use the mail. Both policies violate Section 2, on a
straightforward application of its text. Considering the “totality
of circumstances,” both “result in” members of some races having
“less opportunity than other members of the electorate to
participate in the political process and to elect a representative
of their choice.” §10301(b). The majority reaches the opposite
conclusion because it closes its eyes to the facts on the
ground.[ 10 ]

															A

															Arizona’s out-of-precinct policy requires
discarding any Election Day ballot cast elsewhere than in a voter’s
assigned precinct. Under the policy, officials throw out every
choice in every race—including national or statewide races
( e . g ., for President or Governor) that appear
identically on every precinct’s ballot. The question is whether
that policy unequally affects minority citizens’ opportunity to
cast a vote.

															Although the majority portrays Arizona’s use of
the rule as “unremarkable,” ante , at 26, the State is in
fact a national aberration when it comes to discarding out-of-
precinct ballots. In 2012, about 35,000 ballots across the country
were thrown out because they were cast at the wrong precinct. See
U. S. Election Assistance Commission, 2012 Election
Administration and Voting Survey 53 (2013). Nearly one in three of
those discarded votes—10,979—was cast in Arizona. Id ., at
52. As the Court of Appeals concluded, and the chart below
indicates, Arizona threw away ballots in that year at 11 times the
rate of the second-place discarder (Washington State). Democratic Nat . Committee v. Hobbs , 948 F.3d
989, 1001 (CA9 2020); see App. 72. Somehow the majority labels that
difference “marginal[ ],” ante , at 27, but it is
anything but. More recently, the number of discarded ballots in the
State has gotten smaller: Arizona counties have increasingly
abandoned precinct-based voting (in favor of county-wide “vote
centers”), so the out-of-precinct rule has fewer votes to operate
on. And the majority primarily relies on those latest (2016)
numbers. But across the five elections at issue in this litigation
(2008–2016), Arizona threw away far more out-of-precinct
votes—almost 40,000—than did any other State in the country.

															Votes in such numbers can matter—enough for
Section 2 to apply. The majority obliquely suggests not, comparing
the smallish number of thrown-out votes (minority and non-minority
alike) to the far larger number of votes cast and counted. See ante , at 27. But elections are often fought and won at the
margins—certainly in Arizona. Consider the number of votes
separating the two presidential candidates in the most recent
election: 10,457. That is fewer votes than Arizona discarded under
the out-of-precinct policy in two of the prior three presidential
elections. This Court previously rejected the idea—the “erroneous
assumption”—“that a small group of voters can never influence the
outcome of an election.” Chisom , 501 U. S., at 397,
n. 24. For that reason, we held that even “a small minority”
group can claim Section 2 protection. See ibid . Similarly
here, the out-of-precinct policy—which discards thousands upon
thousands of ballots in every election—affects more than sufficient
votes to implicate Section 2’s guarantee of equal electoral
opportunity.

															And the out-of-precinct policy operates
unequally: Ballots cast by minorities are more likely to be
discarded. In 2016, Hispanics, African Americans, and Native
Americans were about twice as likely—or said another way, 100% more
likely—to have their ballots discarded than whites. See App. 122.
And it is possible to break that down a bit. Sixty percent of the
voting in Arizona is from Maricopa County. There, Hispanics were
110% more likely, African Americans 86% more likely, and Native
Americans 73% more likely to have their ballots tossed. See id ., at 153. Pima County, the next largest county, provides
another 15% of the statewide vote. There, Hispanics were 148% more
likely, African Americans 80% more likely, and Native Americans 74%
more likely to lose their votes. See id ., at 157. The record
does not contain statewide figures for 2012. But in Maricopa and
Pima Counties, the percentages were about the same as in 2016. See id ., at 87, 91. Assessing those disparities, the plaintiffs’
expert found, and the District Court accepted, that the
discriminatory impact of the out-of-precinct policy was
statistically significant—meaning, again, that it was highly
unlikely to occur by chance. See Democratic Nat . Committee v. Reagan , 329 F. Supp. 3d 824, 871
(Ariz. 2018); supra , at 15, n. 4.

															The majority is wrong to assert that those
statistics are “highly misleading.” Ante , at 28. In the
majority’s view, they can be dismissed because the great mass of
voters are unaffected by the out-of-precinct policy. See ibid . But Section 2 is less interested in “absolute terms”
(as the majority calls them) than in relative ones. Ante , at
27; see supra , at 14–15. Arizona’s policy creates a
statistically significant disparity between minority and white
voters: Because of the policy, members of different racial groups
do not in fact have an equal likelihood of having their ballots
counted. Suppose a State decided to throw out 1% of the Hispanic
vote each election. Presumably, the majority would not approve the
action just because 99% of the Hispanic vote is unaffected. Nor
would the majority say that Hispanics in that system have an equal
shot of casting an effective ballot. Here, the policy is not so
overt; but under Section 2, that difference does not matter.
Because the policy “results in” statistically significant
inequality, it implicates Section 2. And the kind of inequality
that the policy produces is not the kind only a statistician could
see. A rule that throws out, each and every election, thousands of
votes cast by minority citizens is a rule that can affect election
outcomes. If you were a minority vote suppressor in Arizona or
elsewhere, you would want that rule in your bag of tricks. You
would not think it remotely irrelevant.

															And the case against Arizona’s policy grows only
stronger the deeper one digs. The majority fails to conduct the
“searching practical evaluation” of “past and present reality” that
Section 2’s “totality of circumstances” inquiry demands. De
Grandy , 512 U. S., at 1018. Had the majority done so, it
would have discovered why Arizona’s out-of- precinct policy has
such a racially disparate impact on voting opportunity. Much of the
story has to do with the siting and shifting of polling places.
Arizona moves polling places at a startling rate. Maricopa County
(recall, Arizona’s largest by far) changed 40% or more of polling
places before both the 2008 and the 2012 elections. See 329
F. Supp. 3d, at 858 (noting also that changes “continued to
occur in 2016”). In 2012 (the election with the best data), voters
affected by those changes had an out-of-precinct voting rate that
was 40% higher than other voters did. See ibid . And,
critically, Maricopa’s relocations hit minority voters harder than
others. In 2012, the county moved polling stations in African
American and Hispanic neighborhoods 30% more often than in white
ones. See App. 110–111. The odds of those changes leading to
mistakes increased yet further because the affected areas are home
to citizens with relatively low education and income levels. See id ., at 170–171. And even putting relocations aside, the
siting of polling stations in minority areas caused significant
out-of-precinct voting. Hispanic and Native American voters had to
travel further than white voters did to their assigned polling
places. See id ., at 109. And all minority voters were
disproportionately likely to be assigned to polling places other
than the ones closest to where they lived. See id ., at 109,
and n. 30, 175–176. Small wonder, given such siting decisions,
that minority voters found it harder to identify and get to their
correct precincts. But the majority does not address these
matters.[ 11 ]

															Facts also undermine the State’s asserted
interests, which the majority hangs its hat on. A government
interest, as even the majority recognizes, is “merely one factor to
be considered” in Section 2’s totality analysis. Houston
Lawyers’ Assn ., 501 U. S., at 427; see ante , at 19.
Here, the State contends that it needs the out-of-precinct policy
to support a precinct-based voting system. But 20 other States
combine precinct-based systems with mechanisms for partially
counting out-of-precinct ballots (that is, counting the votes for
offices like President or Governor). And the District Court found
that it would be “administratively feasible” for Arizona to join
that group. 329 F. Supp. 3d, at 860. Arizona—echoed by the
majority—objects that adopting a partial-counting approach would
decrease compliance with the vote-in-your-precinct rule (by
reducing the penalty for a voter’s going elsewhere). But there is
more than a little paradox in that response. We know from the
extraordinary number of ballots Arizona discards that its current
system fails utterly to “induce[ ] compliance.” Ante ,
at 28–29; see supra , at 30–31. Presumably, that is because
the system—most notably, its placement and shifting of polling
places—sows an unparalleled level of voter confusion. A State that
makes compliance with an election rule so unusually hard is in no
position to claim that its interest in “induc[ing] compliance”
outweighs the need to remedy the race-based discrimination that
rule has caused.

															B

															Arizona’s law mostly banning third-party
ballot collection also results in a significant race-based
disparity in voting opportunities. The problem with that law again
lies in facts nearly unique to Arizona—here, the presence of rural
Native American communities that lack ready access to mail service.
Given that circumstance, the Arizona statute discriminates in just
the way Section 2 proscribes. The majority once more comes to a
different conclusion only by ignoring the local conditions with
which Arizona’s law interacts.

															The critical facts for evaluating the
ballot-collection rule have to do with mail service. Most Arizonans
vote by mail. But many rural Native American voters lack access to
mail service, to a degree hard for most of us to fathom. Only 18%
of Native voters in rural counties receive home mail delivery,
compared to 86% of white voters living in those counties. See 329
F. Supp. 3d, at 836. And for many or most, there is no nearby
post office. Native Americans in rural Arizona “often must travel
45 minutes to 2 hours just to get to a mailbox.” 948 F. 3d, at
1006; see 329 F. Supp. 3d, at 869 (“Ready access to reliable
and secure mail service is nonexistent” in some Native American
communities). And between a quarter to a half of households in
these Native communities do not have a car. See ibid . So
getting ballots by mail and sending them back poses a serious
challenge for Arizona’s rural Native Americans.[ 12 ]

															For that reason, an unusually high rate of
Native Americans used to “return their early ballots with the
assistance of third parties.” Id ., at 870.[ 13 ] As the District Court found: “[F]or
many Native Americans living in rural locations,” voting “is an
activity that requires the active assistance of friends and
neighbors.” Ibid . So in some Native communities, third-party
collection of ballots—mostly by fellow clan members—became
“standard practice.” Ibid . And stopping it, as one tribal
election official testified, “would be a huge devastation.” Ibid .; see Brief for Navajo Nation as Amicus Curiae 19–20 (explaining that ballot collection is how Navajo voters “have
historically handled their mail-in ballots”).

															Arizona has always regulated these activities to
prevent fraud. State law makes it a felony offense for a ballot
collector to fail to deliver a ballot. See Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann.
§16–1005 (Cum. Supp. 2020). It is also a felony for a ballot
collector to tamper with a ballot in any manner. See ibid .
And as the District Court found, “tamper evident envelopes and a
rigorous voter signature verification procedure” protect against
any such attempts. 329 F. Supp. 3d, at 854. For those reasons
and others, no fraud involving ballot collection has ever come to
light in the State. Id ., at 852.

															Still, Arizona enacted—with full knowledge of
the likely discriminatory consequences—the near-blanket
ballot-collection ban challenged here. The first version of the
law—much less stringent than the current one—passed the Arizona
Legislature in 2011. But the Department of Justice, in its Section
5 review, expressed skepticism about the statute’s compliance with
the Voting Rights Act, and the legislature decided to repeal the
law rather than see it blocked (and thereby incur statutory
penalties). See 329 F. Supp. 3d, at 880; 52 U. S. C.
§10303(a)(1)(E) (providing that if a state law fails Section 5
review, the State may not escape the preclearance process for
another 10 years). Then, this Court decided Shelby County .
With Section 5 gone, the State Legislature felt free to proceed
with a new ballot-collection ban, despite the potentially
discriminatory effects that the preclearance process had revealed.
The enacted law contains limited exceptions for family members and
caregivers. But it includes no similar exceptions for clan members
or others with Native kinship ties. They and anyone else who picks
up a neighbor’s ballot and takes it to a post office, or delivers
it to an election site, is punishable as a felon. See Ariz. Rev.
Stat. §16–1005(H).

															Put all of that together, and Arizona’s
ballot-collection ban violates Section 2. The ban interacts with
conditions on the ground—most crucially, disparate access to mail
service—to create unequal voting opportunities for Native
Americans. Recall that only 18% of rural Native Americans in the
State have home delivery; that travel times of an hour or more to
the nearest post office are common; that many members of the
community do not have cars. See supra , at 36. Given those
facts, the law prevents many Native Americans from making effective
use of one of the principal means of voting in Arizona.[ 14 ] What is an inconsequential
burden for others is for these citizens a severe hardship. And the
State has shown no need for the law to go so far. Arizona, as noted
above, already has statutes in place to deter fraudulent collection
practices. See supra , at 37. Those laws give every sign of
working. Arizona has not offered any evidence of fraud in ballot
collection, or even an account of a harm threatening to happen. See
329 F. Supp. 3d, at 852 (“[T]here has never been a case of
voter fraud associated with ballot collection charged in Arizona”).
And anyway, Arizona did not have to entirely forego a
ballot-collection restriction to comply with Section 2. It could,
for example, have added an exception to the statute for Native clan
or kinship ties, to accommodate the special, “intensely local”
situation of the rural Native American community. Gingles ,
478 U. S., at 79. That Arizona did not do so shows, at best,
selective indifference to the voting opportunities of its Native
American citizens.

															The majority’s opinion fails to acknowledge any
of these facts. It quotes extensively from the District Court’s
finding that the ballot-collection ban does not interfere with the
voting opportunities of minority groups generally. See ante ,
at 31, n. 19. But it never addresses the court’s separate
finding that the ban poses a unique burden for Native Americans.
See supra , at 36–37. Except in a pair of footnotes
responding to this dissent, the term “Native American” appears once
(count it, once) in the majority’s five-page discussion of
Arizona’s ballot-collection ban. So of course that community’s
strikingly limited access to mail service is not
addressed.[ 15 ] In the
majority’s alternate world, the collection ban is just a “usual
burden[ ] of voting” for everyone. Ante , at 30. And in
that world, “[f]raud is a real risk” of ballot collection—as to
every community, in every circumstance—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 substitute 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 resulting 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
attempt 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 voting 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 political process would be equally open to
every citizen, regardless 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 be considering any old piece of
legislation—say, the Lanham Act or ERISA.

															But then, at least, the majority should treat
the Voting Rights Act as if it were ordinary legislation. The Court
always says that it must interpret a statute according to its
text—that it has no warrant to override congressional choices. But
the majority today flouts those choices with abandon. The language
of Section 2 is as broad as broad can be. It applies to any policy
that “results in” disparate voting opportunities for minority
citizens. It prohibits, without any need to show bad motive, even
facially neutral laws that make voting harder for members of one
race than of another, given their differing life circumstances.
That is the expansive statute Congress wrote, and that our prior
decisions have recognized. But the majority today lessens the
law—cuts Section 2 down to its own preferred size. The majority
creates a set of extra-textual exceptions and considerations to sap
the Act’s strength, and to save laws like Arizona’s. No matter what
Congress wanted, the majority has other ideas.

															This Court has no right to remake Section 2.
Maybe some think that vote suppression is a relic of history—and so
the need for a potent Section 2 has come and gone. Cf. Shelby
County , 570 U. S., at 547 (“[T]hings have changed
dramatically”). But Congress gets to make that call. Because it has
not done so, this Court’s duty is to apply the law as it is
written. The law that confronted one of this country’s most
enduring wrongs; pledged to give every American, of every race, an
equal chance to participate in our democracy; and now stands as the
crucial tool to achieve that goal. That law, of all laws, deserves
the sweep and power Congress gave it. That law, of all laws, should
not be diminished by this Court. Notes 1 The majority brands this
historical account part of an “extended effort at misdirection.” Ante , at 22. I am tempted merely to reply: Enough said about
the majority’s outlook on the statute before us. But I will add
what should be obvious—that no one can understand the Voting Rights
Act without recognizing what led Congress to enact it, and what
Congress wanted it to change. 2 Although causation is
hard to establish definitively, those post- Shelby County changes appear to have reduced minority participation in the next
election cycle. The most comprehensive study available found that
in areas freed from Section 5 review, white turnout remained the
same, but “minority participation dropped by 2.1 percentage
points”—a stark reversal in direction from prior elections. Ang, Do
40-Year-Old Facts Still Matter?, 11 Am. Econ. J.: Applied
Economics, No. 3, pp. 1, 35 (2019). The results, said the scholar
who crunched the numbers, “provide early evidence that the Shelby
ruling may jeopardize decades of voting rights progress.” Id ., at 36. The election laws passed in Shelby
County ’s wake “may have negated many of the gains made under
preclearance.” Ibid . 3 A final sentence, not at
issue here, specifies that the voting right provided does not
entitle minority citizens to proportional representation in
electoral offices. See infra , at 19, n. 6. 4 I agree with the majority
that “very small differences” among racial groups do not matter. Ante , at 18. Some racial disparities are too small to
support a finding of unequal access because they are not
statistically significant—that is, because they might have arisen
from chance alone. See Matrixx Initiatives , Inc . v. Siracusano , 563 U.S.
27 , 39 (2011). The statistical significance test is standard in
all legal contexts addressing disparate impact. See Ricci v. DeStefano , 557 U.S.
557 , 587 (2009). In addition, there may be some threshold of
what is sometimes called “practical significance”—a level of
inequality that, even if statistically meaningful, is just too
trivial for the legal system to care about. See Federal Judicial
Center, Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence 252 (3d ed. 2011)
(discussing differences that are not “practically
important”). 5 The majority pretends
that Houston Lawyers’ Assn . did not ask about the
availability of a less discriminatory means of serving the State’s
end, see ante , at 23, n. 16—but the inquiry is right there
on page 428 (examining “if [the] impairment of a minority group’s
voting strength could be remedied without significantly impairing
the State’s interest in electing judges on a district-wide basis”).
In posing that question, the Court did what Congress wanted,
because absent a necessity test, States could too easily get away
with offering “non-racial” but pretextual “rationalization[s].”
S. Rep., at 37; see supra , at 14. And the Court did
what it always does in applying laws barring discriminatory
effects—ask whether a challenged policy is necessary to achieve the
asserted goal. See infra , at 26. Contrary to the majority’s
view, that kind of inquiry would not result in “invalidat[ing] just
about any voting rule a State adopts.” Ante , at 24. A
plaintiff bears the burden of showing that a less discriminatory
law would be “at least as effective in achieving the [State’s]
legitimate purpose.” Reno v. American Civil Liberties
Union , 521 U.S.
844 , 874 (1997). And “cost may be an important factor” in that
analysis, so the plaintiff could not (as the majority proposes) say
merely that the State can combat fraud by “hiring more
investigators and prosecutors.” Burwell v. Hobby Lobby
Stores , Inc ., 573 U.S.
682 , 730 (2014); ante , at 24. Given those features of
the alternative-means inquiry, a State that tries both to serve its
electoral interests and to give its minority citizens equal
electoral access will rarely have anything to fear from a Section 2
suit. 6 Contra the majority, see ante , at 5–6, 22, and n. 14, the House-Senate compromise
reached in amending Section 2 has nothing to do with the law
relevant here. The majority is hazy about the content of this
compromise for a reason: It was about proportional representation.
As then-Justice Rehnquist explained, members of the Senate
expressed concern that the “results in” language of the
House-passed bill would provide not “merely for equal ‘access’ to
the political process” but also “for proportional representation”
of minority voters. Mississippi Republican Executive
Committee v. Brooks , 469 U.S.
1002 , 1010 (1984) (dissenting opinion). Senator Dole’s solution
was to add text making clear that minority voters had a right to
equal voting opportunities, but no right to elect minority
candidates “in numbers equal to their proportion in the
population.” 52 U. S. C. §10301(b). The Dole Amendment,
as Justice Rehnquist noted, ensured that under the “results in”
language equal “ ‘access’ only was required.” 469 U. S.,
at 1010–1011; see 128 Cong. Rec. 14132 (1982) (Sen. Dole explaining
that as amended “the focus of the standard is on whether there is
equal access to the political process, not on whether members of a
particular minority group have achieved proportional election
results”). Nothing—literally nothing—suggests that the Senate
wanted to water down the equal-access right that everyone agreed
the House’s language covered. So the majority is dead wrong to say
that I want to “undo” the House-Senate compromise. Ante , at
22. It is the majority that wants to transform that compromise to
support a view of Section 2 held in neither the House nor the
Senate. 7 In a single sentence, the
majority huffs that “nobody disputes” various of these “points of
law.” Ante , at 21. Excellent! I only wish the majority would
take them to heart, both individually and in combination. For
example, the majority says it agrees that Section 2 reaches beyond
denials of voting to any “abridgement.” But then, as I’ll later
discuss, it insists that Section 2 has an interest only in rules
that “block or seriously hinder voting”—which appears to create a
“denial or serious abridgement” standard. Ante , at
16; see infra , at 22–23. Or, for example, the majority says
it accepts that Section 2 may prohibit facially neutral election
rules. But the majority takes every opportunity of casting doubt on
those applications. Each facially neutral rule it mentions is one
that it “doubt[s]” Congress could have “intended to uproot.” Ante , at 18; see ante , at 6, 18, 21, 25. And it
criticizes this dissent for understanding the statute (but how
could anyone understand it differently?) as focusing on the
racially “disparate impact” of neutral election rules on the
opportunity to vote. Ante , at 21. Most fundamentally, the
majority refuses to acknowledge how all the “points of law” it
professes to agree with work in tandem to signal a statute of
significant power and scope. 8 The House Report listed
some of those offensive, even though facially neutral and
then-prevalent, practices: “inconvenient location and hours of
registration, dual registration for county and city elections,”
“frequent and unnecessary purgings and burdensome registration
requirements, and failure to provide . . . assistance to
illiterates.” H. R. Rep., at 14. So too the Senate Report
complained of “inconvenient voting and registration hours” and
“reregistration requirements and purging of voters.” S. Rep.,
at 10, n. 22; see supra , at 16. 9 Even setting aside
Section 2’s status-quo-disrupting lean, this Court has long
rejected—including just last Term—the majority’s claim that the
state of the world at the time of a statute’s enactment provides a
useful “benchmark[ ]” when applying a broadly written law. Ante , at 17. Such a law will typically come to encompass
applications—even “important” ones—that were not “foreseen at the
time of enactment.” Bostock v. Clayton County , 590
U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (slip op., at 26). To prevent that from
happening—as the majority does today, on the ground that Congress
simply must have “intended” it—is “to displace the plain meaning of
the law in favor of something lying behind it.” Ibid .; see id ., at ___ (slip op., at 30) (When a law is “written in
starkly broad terms,” it is “virtually guaranteed that unexpected
applications [will] emerge over time”). 10 Because I would affirm the Court of
Appeals’ holding that the effects of these policies violate Section
2, I need not pass on that court’s alternative holding that the
laws were enacted with discriminatory intent. 11 The
majority’s excuse for failing to consider the plaintiffs’ evidence
on Arizona’s siting of polling places is that the plaintiffs did
not bring a separate claim against those practices. See ante , at 30, n. 18. If that sounds odd, it is. The
majority does not contest that the evidence on polling-place siting
is relevant to the plaintiffs’ challenge to the out-of-precinct
policy. Nor could the majority do so. The siting practices are one
of the background conditions against which the out-of-precinct
policy operates—exactly the kind of thing that a
totality-of-circumstances analysis demands a court take into
account. To refuse to think about those practices because the
plaintiffs might have brought a freestanding claim against them is
to impose an out-of-thin-air pleading requirement that operates to
exclude exactly the evidence that most strongly signals a Section 2
violation. 12 Certain Hispanic communities in
Arizona confront similar difficulties. For example, in the border
town of San Luis, which is 98% Hispanic, “[a]lmost 13,000 residents
rely on a post office located across a major highway” for their
mail service. 329 F. Supp. 3d, at 869. The median income in
San Luis is $22,000, so “many people [do] not own[ ]
cars”—making it “difficult” to “receiv[e] and send[ ] mail.” Ibid . 13 The
majority faults the plaintiffs for failing to provide “concrete”
statistical evidence on this point. See ante , at 31. But no
evidence of that kind exists: Arizona has never compiled data on
third-party ballot collection. And the witness testimony the
plaintiffs offered in its stead allowed the District Court to
conclude that minority voters, and especially Native Americans,
disproportionately needed third-party assistance to vote. See 329
F. Supp. 3d, at 869–870. 14 To
make matters worse, in-person voting does not provide a feasible
alternative for many rural Native voters. Given the low population
density on Arizona’s reservations, the distance to an assigned
polling place—like that to a post office—is usually long. Again,
many Native citizens do not own cars. And the State’s polling-place
siting practices cause some voters to go to the wrong precincts.
Respecting the last factor, the District Court found that because
Navajo voters “lack standard addresses[,] their precinct
assignments” are “based upon guesswork.” Democratic Nat . Committee v. Reagan , 329 F. Supp. 3d 824, 873
(Ariz. 2018). As a result, there is frequent “confusion about the
voter’s correct polling place.” Ibid . 15 In
one of those footnotes, the majority defends its omission by saying
that “no individual [Native American] voter testified that [the
collection ban] would make it significantly more difficult for him
or her to vote.” Ante , at 34, n. 21. But as stated
above, the District Court found, based on the testimony of
“lawmakers, elections officials[,] community advocates,” and tribal
representatives, that the ban would have that effect for many
Native American voters. 329 F. Supp. 3d, at 868; see id ., at 870 (“[F]or many Native Americans living in rural
locations,” voting “is an activity that requires the active
assistance of friends and neighbors”); supra , at 36–37. The
idea that the claim here fails because the plaintiffs did not
produce less meaningful evidence (a single person’s
experience) does not meet the straight-face standard. And the
majority’s remaining argument is, if anything, more eccentric.
Here, the majority assures us that the Postal Service has a
“statutory obligation[ ]” to provide “effective and regular
postal services to rural areas.” Ante , at 34, n. 21.
But the record shows what the record shows—once again, in the Court
of Appeals’ words, that Native Americans in rural Arizona “often
must travel 45 minutes to 2 hours just to get to a mailbox.” Democratic Nat . Committee v. Hobbs , 948 F.3d
989, 1006 (CA9 2020). That kind of background circumstance is
central to Section 2’s totality-of-circumstances analysis—and here
produces a significant racial disparity in the opportunity 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.