4 BRNOVICH v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE Opinion of the Court abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” 79 Stat. 437. Unlike other provisions of the VRA, §2 attracted relatively little attention during the congressional debates 2 and was “little-used” for more than a decade after its passage. 3 But during the same period, this Court considered several cases involving “vote-dilution” claims asserted under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. See Whitcomb v. Chavis, 403 U. S. 124 (1971); Burns v. Richardson, 384 U. S. 73 (1966); Fortson v. Dorsey, 379 U. S. 433 (1965). In these and later vote-dilution cases, plaintiffs claimed that features of legislative districting plans, including the configuration of legislative districts and the use of multi-member districts, diluted the ability of particular voters to affect the outcome of elections. One Fourteenth Amendment vote-dilution case, White v. Regester, 412 U. S. 755 (1973), came to have outsized importance in the development of our VRA case law. In White, the Court affirmed a District Court’s judgment that two multi-member electoral districts were “being used invidiously to cancel out or minimize the voting strength of racial groups.” Id., at 765. The Court explained what a votedilution plaintiff must prove, and the words the Court chose would later assume great importance in VRA §2 matters. According to White, a vote-dilution plaintiff had to show that “the political processes leading to nomination and election were not equally open to participation by the group in question—that its members had less opportunity than did other residents in the district to participate in the political processes and to elect legislators of their choice.” Id., at 766 (emphasis added). The decision then recited many pieces of evidence the District Court had taken into account, and it —————— 2 See Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U. S. 55, 60–61 (1980) (plurality opinion) (describing §2’s “sparse” legislative history). 3 Boyd & Markman, The 1982 Amendments to the Voting Rights Act: A Legislative History, 40 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 1347, 1352��1353 (1983).