286
Opinion of the Court
In saying this, we recognize that the NVRA imposes certain mandates on States, describing those mandates in detail. The NVRA says, for example, that the state driver's license applications must also serve as voter registration applications and that a decision not to register will remain confidential. 42 U. S. C. §§ 1973gg-3(a)(1), (c)(2)(D)(ii). It says that States cannot force driver's license applications to submit the same information twice (on license applications and again on registration forms). § 1973gg-3(c)(2)(A). Nonetheless, implementation of the NVRA is not purely ministerial. The NVRA still leaves room for policy choice. The NVRA does not list, for example, all the other information the State may—or may not—provide or request. And a decision about that other information—say, whether or not to tell the applicant that registration counts only for federal elections—makes Mississippi's changes to the New System the kind of discretionary, nonministerial changes that call for federal VRA review. Hence, Mississippi must preclear those changes.
C
We shall consider Mississippi's two important arguments to the contrary.
1
The first set of arguments concerns the effect of the Attorney General's preclearance letter. Mississippi points out that the Department of Justice wrote to the State on February 1, 1995, that the Attorney General did "not interpose any objection" to its NVRA changes. App. to Juris. Statement 17a. Hence, says Mississippi, the Attorney General has already precleared its efforts to comply.
The submission that the Attorney General approved, however, assumed that Mississippi's administrative changes would permit NVRA registrants to vote in both state and federal elections. The submission included a pamphlet entitled The National Voter Registration Act, App. 26-43, which
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