Properly conceived, the results test protects racial minorities against a stacked deck but does not guarantee that they will be dealt a winning hand.
Whitcomb—an opinion purportedly codified in the 1982 amendment—illustrates the point. There, the Court discerned no denial of equal opportunity when a minority group's failure to elect its preferred candidates “emerges more as a function of losing elections than of built-in bias” directed by the establishment majority against the minority group.
Whitcomb, 403 U.S. at 153, 91 S.Ct. at 1874. The lesson to be learned is that, even when election returns in effect short-circuit a minority group's voting power, the electoral structure is not illegal if the defeat represents nothing more than the routine operation of political factors.
See id. In other words, even under the 1982 amendment, a lack of electoral success
unrelated to race is not a proxy for a lack of opportunity to succeed. Hence, VRA § 2, as amended, despite its focus on results, does not require courts to ignore evidence that factors other than race are the real obstacles to the political success of a minority group.
See Gingles, 478 U.S. at 101, 106 S.Ct. at 2792–93 (O'Connor, J., concurring) (“The overall vote dilution inquiry neither requires nor permits an arbitrary rule against consideration of all evidence concerning voting preferences other than statistical evidence of racial voting patterns.”).