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Opinion of Stevens, J.
tion ballot. Those elections, moreover, were open to any candidate who was able to meet the filing requirements, and to black as well as white voters. If the Jaybirds' nominating process violated the Fifteenth Amendment because black voters were not permitted to participate, despite the entirely voluntary nature of the Jaybird association, then § 5—which requires preclearance of all practices with the potential to discriminate—must cover the Party's exclusion of voters from its convention.28
Appellees nevertheless assert that Terry, like the other White Primary Cases, has no bearing on the proper interpretation of the Voting Rights Act. They offer three reasons for that contention: first, that their convention did not operate in a racially discriminatory manner, Brief for Appellees 37; second, that the 89th Congress did not intend to legislate to the "outer limit" of the Fifteenth Amendment, ibid.; and third, that present-day Virginia is not a one-party Commonwealth, unlike Texas after Reconstruction, id., at 36. None of these reasons is persuasive.
First, while it is true that the case before us today does not involve any charge of racial discrimination in voting, the decision whether discrimination has occurred or was intended to occur, as we have explained on many occasions, is for the Attorney General or the District Court for the District of Columbia to make in the first instance. NAACP v. Hampton County Election Comm'n, 470 U. S. 166, 181 (1985); McCain v. Lybrand, 465 U. S., at 250; Dougherty County Bd. of Ed. v. White, 439 U. S., at 42; Georgia v. United States, 411 U. S. 526, 534 (1973); Perkins v. Matthews,
28 The analogy is even closer, for the Jaybirds originally performed their nominations in mass meetings. See 345 U. S., at 470 (opinion of Frankfurter, J.); id., at 480 (Clark, J., concurring). Nothing in any of the opinions suggests—and it would be perverse to suppose—that the Jaybirds' nominating activities only became unconstitutional when they switched to balloting methods.
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