Cite as: 594 U. S. ____ (2021) 21 Opinion of the Court those regulating employment and housing. For example, we think it inappropriate to read §2 to impose a strict “necessity requirement” that would force States to demonstrate that their legitimate interests can be accomplished only by means of the voting regulations in question. Stephanopoulos, Disparate Impact, Unified Law, 128 Yale L. J. 1566, 1617–1619 (2019) (advocating such a requirement). Demanding such a tight fit would have the effect of invalidating a great many neutral voting regulations with long pedigrees that are reasonable means of pursuing legitimate interests. It would also transfer much of the authority to regulate election procedures from the States to the federal courts. For those reasons, the Title VII and Fair Housing Act models are unhelpful in §2 cases. D The interpretation set out above follows directly from what §2 commands: consideration of “the totality of circumstances” that have a bearing on whether a State makes voting “equally open” to all and gives everyone an equal “opportunity” to vote. The dissent, by contrast, would rewrite the text of §2 and make it turn almost entirely on just one circumstance—disparate impact. That is a radical project, and the dissent strains mightily to obscure its objective. To that end, it spends 20 pages discussing matters that have little bearing on the questions before us. The dissent provides historical background that all Americans should remember, see post, at 3–7 (opinion of KAGAN, J.), but that background does not tell us how to decide these cases. The dissent quarrels with the decision in Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U. S. 529 (2013), see post, at 7–9, which concerned §§4 and 5 of the VRA, not §2. It discusses all sorts of voting rules that are not at issue here. See post, at 9–12. And it dwells on points of law that nobody disputes: that §2 applies to a broad range of voting rules, practices, and procedures; that an “abridgement” of the

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