They have opened an obvious side door. By utilizing “presumption of legislative good faith” in their rulling, for a case where it is demonstrably obvious that the legislator was not operating in good faith, they give a future court a super easy out for overturning this, and a whole lot of other rulings.

Now overall, they have a tiny point. Proving intent is hard most of the time. And the reality is that the voting rights act is extremely tough to enforce. Soo much so that it probably shouldn’t exist. Further, without it, the current system can’t possibly be fair. So that leads to what seems obvious to all of us. The system where the state legislature decides the map needs to be abolished. They have neither good faith, nor intent to represent the will of the population.

The whole concept of districts just doesn’t work at the current scale. The idea was that the representative actually knew the people they represented, and could make decisions based on what those people wanted. But at the scale we are now, there is no chance of that. Nor that a given district even has a cohesive opinion on most subjects.

We need to do away with districts, and represent people opinions, not where they live.