282
Opinion of the Court
Comm'n, 502 U. S. 491, 495 (1992) ("To determine whether there have been changes with respect to voting, we must compare the challenged practices with those in existence before they were adopted. Absent relevant intervening changes, the Act requires us to use practices in existence on November 1, 1964, as our standard of comparison"). Regardless, none of the parties asks us to look further back in time than 1994, when the Old System was last in effect. The appellants ask us to consider whether Mississippi's New System amounts to a forbidden effort to implement unprecleared changes either (a) because the New System is "different from" the post-1994 Provisional Plan or (b) because it is "different from" the 1994 Old System. We shall consider each of these claims in turn.
A
First, the appellants and the Government argue that the Provisional Plan, because it was precleared by the Attorney General, became part of the baseline against which to judge whether a future change must be precleared. They add that the New System differs significantly from the Provisional Plan, particularly in its effect on registration for state elections. They conclude that Mississippi had to preclear the New System insofar as it differed from the Provisional Plan.
The District Court rejected this argument on the ground that the Provisional Plan practices and procedures never became part of Mississippi's voting-related practices or procedures, but instead simply amounted to a temporary misapplication of state law. We, too, believe that the Provisional Plan, in the statute's words, was never "in force or effect." 42 U. S. C. § 1973c. The District Court rested its conclusion upon the fact that Mississippi did not change its state law so as to make the Provisional Plan's "unitary" registration system lawful and that neither the Governor nor the legislature nor the state attorney general ratified the Provisional Plan. The appel-
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