22 BRNOVICH v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE Opinion of the Court right to vote under §2 does not require outright denial of the right; that §2 does not demand proof of discriminatory purpose; and that a “facially neutral” law or practice may violate that provision. See post, at 12–20. Only after this extended effort at misdirection is the dissent’s aim finally unveiled: to undo as much as possible the compromise that was reached between the House and Senate when §2 was amended in 1982. Recall that the version originally passed by the House did not contain §2(b) and was thought to prohibit any voting practice that had “discriminatory effects,” loosely defined. See supra, at 5–6. That is the freewheeling disparate-impact regime the dissent wants to impose on the States. But the version enacted into law includes §2(b), and that subsection directs us to consider “the totality of circumstances,” not, as the dissent would have it, the totality of just one circumstance. 14 There is nothing to the dissent’s charge that we are departing from the statutory text by identifying some of those considerations. We have listed five relevant circumstances and have explained why they all stem from the statutory text and have a bearing on the determination that §2 requires. The dissent does not mention a single additional consideration, and —————— 14 The dissent erroneously claims that the Senate-House compromise was only about proportional representation and not about “the equalaccess right” at issue in the present cases. Post, at 19, n. 6. The text of the bill initially passed by the House had no equal-access right. See H. R. Rep. No. 97–227, p. 48 (1981); H. R. 3112, 97th Cong., 1st Sess., §2, p. 8 (introduced Oct. 7, 1981). Section 2(b) was the Senate’s creation, and that provision is what directed courts to look beyond mere “results” to whether a State’s “political processes” are “equally open,” considering “the totality of circumstances.” See Mississippi Republican Executive Committee v. Brooks, 469 U. S. 1002, 1010 (1984) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting) (“The compromise bill retained the ‘results’ language but also incorporated language directly from this Court’s opinion in White v. Regester”). And while the proviso on proportional representation may not apply as directly in this suit, it is still a signal that §2 imposes something other than a pure disparate-impact regime.