278
Opinion of the Court
State. The secretary of state and the implementing committee assumed—and recommended—that the Mississippi Legislature would change state law insofar as that law might prevent a valid registration under the NVRA's provisions from counting as a valid registration for a state or local election. And, on that assumption, at least one official in the secretary of state's office told state election officials to place the name of any new valid applicant under the NVRA on a list that would permit him or her to vote in state, as well as in federal, elections.
Using this Provisional Plan, at least some Mississippi officials registered as many as 4,000 voters between January 1, 1995, and February 10, 1995. On January 25, however, the state legislature tabled a bill that would have made NVRA registrations valid for all elections in Mississippi (by, for example, allowing applicants at driver's license and other agencies to register on the spot, without having to mail in the application themselves, App. 86, by eliminating the attesting witness signature on the mail-in application, compare id., at 96, 101, with Miss. Code Ann. § 23-15-47(3) (Supp. 1996), and by eliminating the optional 4-year purge of nonvoting regis-trants, replacing it with other methods for maintaining upto-date voter rolls, App. 87-92, 103). Because of the legislature's failure to change the Old System's requirements for state election registration, the state attorney general concluded that Provisional Plan registrations that did not meet Old System requirements would not work, under state law, as registration for state elections. State officials notified voter registration officials throughout the State; and they, in turn, were asked to help notify the 4,000 registrants that they were not registered to vote in state or local elections.
The New System. On February 10, 1995, Mississippi began to use what we shall call the New System. That system consists of the changes that its Provisional Plan set forth—but as applied only to registration for federal elections. Mississippi maintains the Old System as the only
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