Cite as: 519 U. S. 9 (1996)
Opinion of the Court
if Louisiana filed a judicial preclearance action within 90 days. Id., at 651. We held that the District Court erred in authorizing these elections in the absence of preclearance, pointing out that although Louisiana had been aware for at least three years that the judgeships were not precleared, it had still failed to file for judicial preclearance. Id., at 655.
We acknowledged in Clark that earlier decisions such as Perkins v. Matthews, 400 U. S. 379 (1971), and Berry v. Doles, 438 U. S. 190 (1978) (per curiam), held that where a covered jurisdiction had already conducted elections under an unprecleared plan, it might be appropriate for the district court to afford local officials an opportunity to seek federal approval before ordering a new election. 500 U. S., at 654. But those cases raised an issue different from the one in Clark. In Perkins and Berry, the District Courts confronted the question whether to set aside illegal elections that had already taken place. By contrast, the District Court in Clark had to decide whether to allow illegal elections to go forward in the first place. In this situation, "§ 5's prohibition against implementation of unprecleared changes required the District Court to enjoin the election." 500 U. S., at 654.
The District Court faced fundamentally the same problem
here as in Clark. The County did not preclear the ordinances as required by § 5. For several years, the County had been on notice that its electoral changes were subject to § 5's preclearance requirements, yet it never obtained judicial or administrative preclearance of the consolidation ordinances. In Clark, we left open the question whether a district court may ever deny a § 5 plaintiff's motion for an injunction and allow a covered jurisdiction to conduct an election under an unprecleared voting plan. We suggested that "[a]n extreme circumstance might be present if a seat's unprecleared status is not drawn to the attention of the [covered jurisdiction] until the eve of the election and there are equitable principles that justify allowing the election to pro-
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