Majority-minority districts are political wards in which racial minorities compose the largest voting block. The districts are created to ensure that minority votes are not diluted and to increase the number of minority officeholders. In the United States, the 1982 Voting Rights Act requires that such districts be created where feasible. Guidelines on the creation of majority-minority districts were refined by the Supreme Court case Thornburg v. Gingles (1986). The case mandated that majority-minority districts should be compact and geographically coherent. After the 1990 census, a significant number of majority-minority districts were created in the United States and the number of minority officeholders at the federal, state, and local levels subsequently rose dramatically, including the election of an additional thirteen African American members of Congress. However, because the districts concentrated minority voters, the redistricting resulted in electoral gains for the Republican Party, which secured an additional ten seats in the House of Representatives in the 1992 and 1994 elections because of the new districts. In 1993, the Supreme Court ruled in Shaw v. Reno that race could not be the only determinant in creating new districts, but it could be a factor.
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