Brown

concurring:

The “turbid waters” of voting rights jurisprudence conceal shoals that precedent makes difficult to acknowledge:

First. It would appear that the most relevant figures would be the ratio of registered majority and minority voters. If registration is not taken into account, phantoms are compared. No doubt, past discrimination may have discouraged the minority from registering; but account *1052 should be taken — possibly by polling — of how many now have qualified to vote.

Second. In any decent democracy, the quality of the candidates has some impact on the voters. Not every member of a racial or ethnic group votes blindly for a candidate from the group. If the district judge is to consider “the totality of the circumstances,” the judge should be free to notice eases where a grossly inferior candidate from the majority was preferred to a much better qualified candidate from the minority or when a grossly inferior candidate from the minority was defeated by a much better qualified candidate from the majority. To be sure, judgment as to superiority or inferiority would require a political judgment from the judge; but so do the other factors the judge is required to…

We enter again the turbulent and at times turbid waters of voting rights litigation. Four American Indian plaintiffs appeal the district court’s judgment in favor of defendant officials of the State of Montana on the plaintiffs’ vote-dilution claim under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. § 1973 . The district court held that the plaintiffs had standing to allege Native American vote dilution only with respect to the House and Senate Districts where they resided. Also, the court held that the plaintiffs had not shown vote dilution in the House and Senate Districts where they resided. Finally and alternatively, the district court held that, even if the plaintiffs had shown vote dilution, their claim failed because of the state’s imminent redistricting and because any remedy would impermissibly disrupt the 2003 elections. We have jurisdiction pursuant to 28 Ú.S.C. § 1291. Concluding that the district Court did not clearly err in determining that the totality of circumstances did not establish vote dilution in the districts where plaintiffs resided, we affirm on that ground.

I

The four Indian plaintiffs, Earl Old Person, Carol Juneau, Joe MacDonald, and Jeannine…