Citation
Jowei Chen & Nicholas Stephanopoulos, The Race-Blind Future of Voting Rights, 130 Yale L.J. 862 (2021).
Abstract
A critical issue in any racial vote-dilution case is the proportionality of a minority group’s representation. In an important recent opinion, Judge Easterbrook proposed replacing the proportionality benchmark with what the authors call the “race-blind baseline” — comparing minority voters’ representation not to their population share but to the fraction of seats they would control if districts were drawn randomly and without the use of racial data. Conservative advocates have been quick to embrace this idea, and the current Supreme Court may be interested in adopting it.
This Article uses the random generation of district maps by computer algorithm — the gold standard in partisan-gerrymandering cases — to evaluate the race-blind baseline across 1,903 districts and 38,000 districting plans spanning 19 states. The authors find that in most states, a nonracial redistricting process would yield substantially fewer minority opportunity districts. They further find that Democrats would not benefit from eliminating opportunity districts under the race-blind baseline; rather, in the southern states where the benchmark would have the biggest impact, Republicans would gain a partisan edge.