Cite as: 594 U. S. ____ (2021) 23 Opinion of the Court it does its best to push aside all but one of the circumstances we discuss. It entirely rejects three of them: the size of the burden imposed by a challenged rule, see post, at 22–23, the landscape of voting rules both in 1982 and in the present, post, at 24–25, 15 and the availability of other ways to vote, post, at 23–24. Unable to bring itself to completely reject consideration of the state interests that a challenged rule serves, the dissent tries to diminish the significance of this circumstance as much as possible. See post, at 26–29. According to the dissent, an interest served by a voting rule, no matter how compelling, cannot support the rule unless a State can prove to the satisfaction of the courts that this interest could not be served by any other means. Post, at 17–18, 26–29. Such a requirement has no footing in the text of §2 or our precedent construing it. 16 —————— 15 The dissent objects to consideration of the 1982 landscape because even rules that were prevalent at that time are invalid under §2 if they, well, violate §2. Post, at 24. We of course agree with that tautology. But the question is what it means to provide equal opportunity, and given that every voting rule imposes some amount of burden, rules that were and are commonplace are useful comparators when considering the totality of circumstances. Unlike the dissent, Congress did not set its sights on every facially neutral time, place, or manner voting rule in existence. See, e.g., S. Rep. No. 97–417, at 10, n. 22 (describing what the Senate Judiciary Committee viewed as “blatant direct impediments to voting”). 16 For support, the dissent offers a baseless reading of one of our votedilution decisions. In Houston Lawyers’ Assn., 501 U. S. 419, we considered a §2 challenge to an electoral scheme wherein all trial judges in a judicial district were elected on a district-wide basis. Id., at 422. The State asserted that it had a strong interest in district-wide judicial elections on the theory that they make every individual judge at least partly accountable to minority voters in the jurisdiction. Id., at 424, 426. That unique interest, the State contended, should have “automatically” exempted the electoral scheme from §2 scrutiny altogether. Id., at 426. We disagreed, holding that the State’s interest was instead “a legitimate factor to be considered by courts among the ‘totality of circumstances’ in determining whether a §2 violation has occurred.” Ibid. To illustrate why an “automati[c]” exemption from §2’s coverage was inappropriate,