Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/678

 502us2$30I 09-08-95 14:43:51 PAGES OPINPGT

520

PRESLEY v. ETOWAH COUNTY COMM’N Stevens, J., dissenting

elective offices have been abolished where blacks had a chance of winning, the appointment process has been substituted for the elective process, election officials have withheld the necessary information for voting or running for office, and both physical and economic intimidation have been employed. “ ‘Section 5 was intended to prevent the use of most of these devices.’ ” 400 U. S., at 389, n. 8.20 Since the decision in Allen, the debate on reenactment of § 5 in 1970, and the issuance of regulations by the Department of Justice,21 it has been recognized that the replacement of an elective office that might be won by a black candidate with an appointive office is one of the methods of maintaining a white majority’s political power that § 5 was designed to forestall. As a practical matter, such a change has the same effect as a change that makes an elected official a mere figurehead by transferring his decisionmaking authority to an 20 Congress recognized that “since the adoption of the Voting Rights Act, covered jurisdictions have substantially moved from direct, over[t] impediments to the right to vote to more sophisticated devices that dilute minority voting strength,” S. Rep. No. 97–417, p. 10 (1982), and that § 5 was intended to be responsive to this shift: “Following the dramatic rise in registration, a broad array of dilution schemes were employed to cancel the impact of the new black vote. Elective posts were made appointive; election boundaries were gerrymandered; majority runoffs were instituted to prevent victories under a prior plurality system; at-large elections were substituted for election by singlemember districts, or combined with other sophisticated rules to prevent an effective minority vote. The ingenuity of such schemes seems endless. Their common purpose and effect has been to offset the gains made at the ballot box under the Act. “Congress anticipated this response. The preclearance provisions of Section 5 were designed to halt such efforts.” Id., at 6. 21 On September 10, 1971, the Department of Justice first adopted regulations implementing § 5’s preclearance provisions. S. Rep. No. 94–295, p. 16 (1975); see 36 Fed. Reg. 18186 (Sept. 10, 1971); 28 CFR pt. 51 (1972); see also Georgia v. United States, 411 U. S., at 536–541 (approving regulations).