Outcome v. Opportunity

Outcome vs. Opportunity

The Supreme Court's recent ruling on a North Carolina redistricting case might not have a huge practical impact. The "crossover district" at issue is not common. But the case is helpful in highlighting one of the enduring divisions in American politics.

The court ruled that the Voting Rights Act does not require creating "safe" seats for minority candidates in districts where minorities make up less than half the voting populace. This, according to another newspaper, overturns a "central goal" of the Voting Rights Act -- "protecting minority voting rights."

But that is utter nonsense. Nothing in the case suggested that minorities were being deprived of the right to vote. They were not kept away from the polls, intimidated, harassed with poll taxes or literacy tests, or otherwise importuned.

The only thing the ruling might be said to do is to reduce, slightly, the odds that a minority might win a particular seat, in the same way that failing to require the political gerrymandering of a legislative district might reduce the odds that an incumbent or a member of a given party might win a particular seat.

To put it another way, the court refused to say that the Voting Rights Act requires states to guarantee political outcomes. But it did nothing to limit opportunities.

The only way the court ruling could be said to interfere with voting rights is if the right to vote is synonymous with the right to have your candidate win. Even then, the argument is predicated on the increasingly outdated notion that minorities automatically prefer candidates who share their skin color, and that white Americans will not vote for a person of ethnic origin. That would come as a surprise to, e.g., Barack Obama.