20
RUCHO v. COMMON CAUSE
Opinion of the Court
number of seats for each party and determine at what
point deviation from that balance went too far. If a 5–3
allocation corresponds most closely to statewide vote
totals, is a 6–2 allocation permissible, given that legislatures have the authority to engage in a certain degree of
partisan gerrymandering? Which seats should be packed
and which cracked? Or if the goal is as many competitive
districts as possible, how close does the split need to be for
the district to be considered competitive? Presumably not
all districts could qualify, so how to choose? Even assuming the court knew which version of fairness to be looking
for, there are no discernible and manageable standards for
deciding whether there has been a violation. The questions are “unguided and ill suited to the development of
judicial standards,” Vieth, 541 U. S., at 296 (plurality
opinion), and “results from one gerrymandering case to the
next would likely be disparate and inconsistent,” id., at
308 (opinion of Kennedy, J.).
Appellees contend that if we can adjudicate one-person,
one-vote claims, we can also assess partisan gerrymandering claims. But the one-person, one-vote rule is relatively
easy to administer as a matter of math. The same cannot
be said of partisan gerrymandering claims, because the
Constitution supplies no objective measure for assessing
whether a districting map treats a political party fairly. It
hardly follows from the principle that each person must
have an equal say in the election of representatives that a
person is entitled to have his political party achieve representation in some way commensurate to its share of
statewide support.
More fundamentally, “vote dilution” in the one-person,
one-vote cases refers to the idea that each vote must carry
equal weight. In other words, each representative must be
accountable to (approximately) the same number of constituents. That requirement does not extend to political
parties. It does not mean that each party must be influen-