{"id":109,"date":"2010-02-25T08:16:26","date_gmt":"2010-02-25T13:16:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/crcl\/?p=109"},"modified":"2016-10-01T13:10:15","modified_gmt":"2016-10-01T17:10:15","slug":"the-dim-side-of-the-bright-line-minority-voting-opportunity-after-bartlett-v-strickland-by-ryan-p-haygood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/crcl\/the-dim-side-of-the-bright-line-minority-voting-opportunity-after-bartlett-v-strickland-by-ryan-p-haygood\/","title":{"rendered":"Article: The Dim Side Of The Bright Line: Minority Voting Opportunity After Bartlett v. Strickland \u2013 By Ryan P. Haygood"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When he left Congress in 1901, George White, an African American  Republican from Tarboro, North Carolina, announced that it was \u201cperhaps  the Negro\u2019s temporary farewell to Congress.\u201d Mr. White\u2019s premonition was  right. Voters from North Carolina would not send another African  American to Congress until 1992, nearly a century later, when Melvin  Watt and Eva Clayton were elected from two majority-black districts.  Their elections were made possible by the Voting Rights Act (\u201cVRA\u201d or  \u201cthe Act\u201d), which is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the  Civil Rights Movement, and has proven to be one of the most successful  federal civil rights statutes, if not statutes of any kind, in American  history.<\/p>\n<p>But last term, the VRA came under attack on numerous fronts. Much  attention4 has been paid to Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District  Number One v. Holder (\u201cNAMUDNO\u201d), an unsuccessful challenge to the  constitutionality of Section 5 of the Act.\u00a0 However, with the spotlight  focused so intently on NAMUDNO, a pivotal case arising from North  Carolina concerning the reach of another crucial provision of the VRA,  has not received sufficient attention.<\/p>\n<p>In Bartlett v. Strickland, a fractured Supreme Court narrowly  construed the protections of Section 2 of the Act as imposing a  bright-line rule regarding when parties can state a claim for minority  vote dilution. Specifically, a minority group must be capable of  constituting a numerical majority of the voting-age population in a  geographically compact area before Section 2 requires the creation of an  electoral district to prevent dilution of that group\u2019s votes. With its  ruling in Bartlett, the Court conclusively answered a question that it  had avoided on four previous occasions. In doing so, the Court  prohibited North Carolina, a state that had previously gone nearly a  century without an African American representative in Congress, from  voluntarily preserving an election district that had reliably provided  its African American residents with an opportunity to elect their  candidate of choice.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/crcl\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2010\/02\/HaygoodFinalFINAL.pdf\">Click For PDF Version<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When he left Congress in 1901, George White, an African American Republican from Tarboro, North Carolina, announced that it was 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