Alito, J., dissenting
A
In my view, there is strong evidence that race played a predominant role in the production of the plaintiffs’ illustrative maps and that it is most unlikely that a map with more than one majority-black district could be created without giving race such a role. An expert hired by the Milligan plaintiffs, Dr. Kosuke Imai, used a computer algorithm to create 30,000 potential maps, none of which contained two majority-black districts. See 2 App. 571–572; Supp. App. 59, 72. In fact, in 20,000 of those simulations, Dr. Imai intentionally created one majority-minority district, and yet even with one majority-minority district guaranteed as a baseline, none of those 20,000 attempts produced a second one. See 2 App. 571–572; Supp. App. 72.
Similarly, Dr. Moon Duchin, another expert hired by the Milligan plaintiffs, opined that “it is hard to draw two majority-black districts by accident.” 2 App. 714. Dr. Duchin also referred to a study where she generated two million maps of potential district configurations in Alabama, none of which contained a second majority-minority district. Id., at 710. And the first team of trained mapmakers that plaintiff Milligan consulted was literally unable to draw a two-majority-black-district map, even when they tried. Id., at 511–512. Milligan concluded at the time that the feat was impossible. Id., at 512.
The majority quibbles about the strength of this evidence, protesting that Dr. Imai’s studies failed to include as controls certain redistricting criteria and that Dr. Duchin’s two-million-map study was based on 2010 census data, see ante, at 26–27, and nn. 6–7, but this is unconvincing for several reasons. It is plaintiffs’ burden to produce evidence and satisfy the Gingles preconditions, so if their experts’ maps were deficient, that is no strike against Alabama. And the racial demographics of the State changed little between 2010 and 2020, Supp. App. 82, which is presumably why Dr. Duchin herself raised the older study in answering
