32 ABBOTT v. PEREZ Opinion of the Court It is indicative of the District Court’s mistaken approach that it inferred bad faith from Texas’s decision to take an appeal to this Court from the D. C. court’s decision denying preclearance. See 274 F. Supp. 3d, at 649 (“Defendants did not accept [these findings] and instead appealed to the Supreme Court”). Congress gave the State the right to appeal, and no bad motive can be inferred from its decision to make use of this right—unless of course the State had no reasonable grounds for appeal. Before our decision in Shelby County mooted Texas’s appeal to this Court from the D. C. court’s preclearance decision, Texas filed a jurisdictional statement claiming that the D. C. court made numerous errors, but the Texas court made no attempt to show that Texas’s arguments were frivolous. As a final note, appellees assert that the 2013 Legislature should have either defended the 2011 plans in litigation or gone back to the drawing board and devised entirely new plans, Brief for Appellees in No. 17–626, at 45, but there is no reason why the Legislature’s options should be limited in this way. It was entirely permissible for the Legislature to favor a legitimate option that promised to simplify and reduce the burden of litigation. That the Legislature chose this course is not proof of discriminatory intent. IV Once the Texas court’s intent finding is reversed, there remain only four districts that were invalidated on alternative grounds. For three of these districts, the District Court relied on the “effects” test of §2. We reverse as to each of these, but we affirm the District Court’s final holding that HD90 is a racial gerrymander. —————— ance proceeding was on the State. Texas v. United States, 887 F. Supp. 2d 133, 151 (DC 2012). Particularly where race and partisanship can so often be confused, see supra, at 3, and n. 3, the burden of proof may be crucial.