2 LOUISIANA v. CALLAIS Syllabus Held: Because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the State’s use of race in creating SB8, and that map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Pp. 17–36. (a) The Constitution almost never permits a State to discriminate on the basis of race, and such discrimination triggers strict scrutiny. The Court’s precedents have identified “only two compelling interests” that can satisfy strict scrutiny: “avoiding imminent and serious risks to human safety in prisons,” and “remediating specific, identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute.” Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U. S. 181. The question presented is whether compliance with §2 of the Voting Rights Act should be added to this very short list of compelling interests. The Court now holds that compliance with §2, as properly construed, can provide such an interest. A proper interpretation of §2 requires examining the statutory text to understand what it demands with respect to drawing legislative districts. Pp. 17–26. (1) Under Section 2(a), the Court takes as a given that a legislative districting map may constitute a “standard, practice, or procedure” that may violate §2 if it “results in a denial or abridgement” of the right to vote “on account of race or color.” Section 2(b) establishes that a violation occurs when political processes are “not equally open to participation by” members of a racial group “in that [they] have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to . . . elect representatives of their choice.” The key concept is “less opportunity than other members of the electorate,” which sets a baseline against which to assess the opportunity of minority voters. That baseline—the opportunity that any given group of voters has to elect their candidate of choice—depends on the voting preferences of other voters in the district. For example, in a district where most voters prefer Democratic candidates, a Republican voter in that district will have a low chance of securing the election of his or her preferred candidate. The roster of voters who end up in a given district depends, in turn, on the districting criteria the State uses to draw a legislative map. Thus, the “opportunity” of these “members of the electorate” to contribute their votes to a winning cause is whatever opportunity results from the application of the State’s combination of permissible districting criteria. That is what a randomly selected individual voter and group of voters can expect regarding their opportunity to elect their preferred candidate. Under §2, a minority voter is entitled to nothing less and nothing more. Pp. 19–22. (2) This interpretation is the best reading of the statutory text and ensures that §2 of the Voting Rights Act does not exceed Congress’s authority under §2 of the Fifteenth Amendment, which confers on