Measuring the Electoral and Policy Impact of Majority-Minority Voting Districts

The Voting Rights Act guarantees minority voters an opportunity to elect the of their choice. Yet the implementation of this requirement is beset with technical difficulties: first, current case law provides no clear definition as to who qualifies as a of choice for the minority community; second, traditional techniques for estimating equal opportunity rely heavily on ecological regression, which is prone to statistical bias; and third, no attempt is made to systematically evaluate the impact of alternative districting strategies on the substantive representation of minority interests rather than just descriptive representation. We offer an alternative approach to majority-minority districting that (1) explicitly defines the term candidate of choice; (2) determines the point of equal opportunity without relying on ecological regression; and (3) estimates the expected impact of competing districting schemes on substantive representation. We then apply this technique to a set of alternative districting plans for the South Carolina State Senate.