Louisiana v. Callais · ¶136

After the Act's passage—and partly because of its initial success—those methods more and more focused on vote dilution. The Act led to a large increase in minority voting registration: In just five years, almost as many African Americans registered to vote in six Southern States as in the entire century before 1965. See C. Davidson, The Voting Rights Act, in Controversies in Minority Voting 21 (B. Grofman & C. Davidson eds. 1992). And the Act mostly halted state efforts to prevent those new voters from casting ballots at all. So the States, as Congress noted when reauthorizing Section 5 in 1975, “resorted to [measures] which would dilute increasing minority voting strength.” City of Rome v. United States, 446 U. S. 156, 181 (1980) (quoting H. R. Rep. No. 94–196, pp. 10–11 (1975)). Efforts to minimize minorities' voting power took several forms. One was to use atlarge voting. A…

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