Straw Men and Stray Bullets: A Reply to Bullock.

In this article, the author comments on the researcher Charles S. Bullock's remarks over his research paper "Multivariate Methods in the Analysis of Racially Polarized Voting: Pitfalls in the Use of Social Science by the Courts." The author says that Bullock omits from his discussion the key legal argument for why it is sensible to focus on bivariate rather than multivariate analysis of voting patterns in cases involving challenges brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In amending Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in 1982, U.S. Congress sought to return to an effects-based standard of vote dilution. In the Supreme Court's operationalization of that standard in Thornburg the first question to be answered re bloc voting is whether or not voting under the challenged at-large plan is such that "members of different races vote in bloc for different candidates. Moreover, the author is not aware of any case decided since Thornburg in which multivariate methods have been accepted in preference to bivariate ones.