24 BRNOVICH v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE Opinion of the Court That requirement also would have the potential to invalidate just about any voting rule a State adopts. Take the example of a State’s interest in preventing voting fraud. Even if a State could point to a history of serious voting fraud within its own borders, the dissent would apparently strike down a rule designed to prevent fraud unless the State could demonstrate an inability to combat voting fraud in any other way, such as by hiring more investigators and prosecutors, prioritizing voting fraud investigations, and heightening criminal penalties. Nothing about equal openness and equal opportunity dictates such a high bar for States to pursue their legitimate interests. With all other circumstances swept away, all that remains in the dissent’s approach is the size of any disparity in a rule’s impact on members of protected groups. As we —————— the Court hypothesized a case involving an “uncouth” district shaped like the one in Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U. S. 339, 340 (1960), for which an inquiry under §2 “would at least arguably be required.” 501 U. S., at 427. The Court then wrote the language upon which the dissent seizes: “Placing elections for single-member offices entirely beyond the scope of coverage of §2 would preclude such an inquiry, even if the State’s interest in maintaining the ‘uncouth’ electoral system was trivial or illusory and even if any resulting impairment of a minority group’s voting strength could be remedied without significantly impairing the State’s interest in electing judges on a district-wide basis.” Id., at 427–428. That reductio ad absurdum, used to demonstrate only why an automatic exemption from §2 scrutiny was inappropriate, did not announce an “inquiry” at all—much less the least-burdensome-means requirement the dissent would have us smuggle in from materially different statutory regimes. Post, at 18, n. 5, 26. Perhaps that is why no one—not the parties, not the United States, not the 36 other amici, not the courts below, and certainly not this Court in subsequent decisions—has advanced the dissent’s surprising reading of a single phrase in Houston Lawyers Assn. The dissent apparently thinks that in 1991 we silently abrogated the principle that the nature of a State’s interest is but one of many factors to consider, see Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S. 30, 44–45 (1986), and that our subsequent cases have erred by failing simply to ask whether a less burdensome measure would suffice. Who knew?