WASHINGTON — Only election districts in which minorities make up at least half of the voting-age population are entitled to the protections of a part of the Voting Rights Act that seeks to ensure and preserve minority voting power, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday.
Officials in North Carolina had argued that the act required them to help maintain black influence at the voting booth by creating a district that included about 39 percent of the black voting-age population. The theory was that the law protected black voters who joined with white “crossover voters” to elect a candidate of the black voters’ choice. The court rejected that argument by a 5-to-4 vote.
Congress did not specify what percentage of minority voters in a district would call for the protections of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 when it later prohibited what courts have termed “vote dilution.” And the Supreme Court until now had avoided picking a number.
The district at issue in the case, which the North Carolina General Assembly created in 2003, was the consequence of an effort to preserve minority voting power notwithstanding changing demographics and legal concerns about the district’s shape. North Carolina officials settled on combining parts of two counties to create a relatively compact district that they said maintained “an adequate representation of black voters,” which was, in their view, 39 percent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/washington/10votes.html?th&emc=th
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