## Facts

- Bleckley County, Georgia, used a county-government structure in which a single elected commissioner exercised the county’s legislative and executive authority.
- In 1985, state law authorized the county to adopt, by referendum, a five-member commission elected from single-member districts with an at-large chair; voters rejected the change.
- The county used a different structure for school board elections, with five members elected from single-member districts.
- Black voters and the local NAACP chapter sued, alleging the single-commissioner system diluted Black voting strength in violation of § 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
- The district court rejected intentional-discrimination claims under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
- The district court also rejected the § 2 claim, finding plaintiffs proved only one of the three preconditions identified in *Thornburg v. Gingles*.
- The court of appeals reversed on the § 2 claim and remanded for a remedy, suggesting a remedy modeled on the county’s school board district system.
- The Supreme Court granted review.

## Issues

1. Whether the size of a governing authority (a single elected commissioner rather than a multi-member commission) is a “standard, practice, or procedure” subject to a vote-dilution challenge under § 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
2. Whether a § 2 vote-dilution claim can succeed when there is no objective, workable “reasonable alternative practice” to serve as a benchmark for measuring dilution where the challenged feature is governmental size.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court reversed the court of appeals and remanded.
- A majority agreed plaintiffs could not establish § 2 liability based on a challenge to the size of the county governing body.
- A plurality concluded that the size of a governing authority is not subject to a § 2 vote-dilution claim because there is no objective and workable benchmark for selecting an alternative size for comparison.
- Concurring Justices agreed in the judgment on narrower or different rationales, including concern about turning § 2 into a tool for judicial restructuring of government, and a separate view that § 2 should not be read to authorize vote-dilution claims.
- Dissenting Justices would have permitted § 2 challenges to governmental size and would have affirmed liability under the *Gingles* framework and the totality of circumstances.

## Legal Principles

- A § 2 vote-dilution claim requires a reasonable alternative practice that can serve as a benchmark against which to measure the challenged practice’s effect on minority electoral opportunity.
- Where the challenged practice is the size of an elected governing body, selecting an alternative size (e.g., one member versus five) lacks an objective, legally workable standard; this prevents the necessary benchmark comparison.
- The prevalence of a different governmental size in the state, legislative authorization to change size, or the jurisdiction’s use of a different structure for another body does not itself supply a benchmark for § 2 dilution analysis of governing-body size.
- Structural remedies that require changing the number of seats on a governing body generally fall outside § 2 vote-dilution theory as applied in this case.

## Conclusion

The Court set a significant limit on § 2 vote-dilution litigation by holding that challenges aimed at changing the size of an elected governing body fail because courts lack a principled benchmark for deciding what alternative size should be used to measure dilution and craft relief.


Holder v. Hall, 512 U.S. 874 (1994)