Cite as: 520 U. S. 273 (1997)
Opinion of the Court
mission. Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 27, n. 14. Still, the law does not require the Attorney General, in these circumstances, to obtain more information. Clark, supra, at 658-659 (The Attorney General is under no duty to investigate voting changes). See also McCain, supra, at 247 (Congress " 'acknowledged and anticipated [the] inability of the Justice Department—given limited resources—to investigate independently all changes . . .' " (quoting Perkins, 400 U. S., at 392, n. 10)). And the issue, of course, is not whether she should or should not have issued a preclearance letter on February 1, 1995, but rather what it was that she precleared. Her failure to seek added information makes it more likely, not less likely, that she intended to preclear what she took to be the natural import of the earlier submission, namely, a proposal for a single state/federal registration system.
Finally, Mississippi argues that the Attorney General in fact knew, on February 1, 1995, when she issued the preclearance letter that the state legislature would not enact the proposed bill. And it adds that the Attorney General nonetheless approved the submission in order to have in place a precleared unitary system that would serve as a benchmark for measuring whether subsequent changes are retrogressive, thereby permitting the Attorney General to argue that § 5 prohibited as retrogressive the dual system which she knew would likely emerge because the legislation failed. In fact, the record is not clear about just what the Department of Justice did or did not know (e. g., whether tabling the bill meant killing it; whether state election law definitely had to be changed). But in any event, the short answer to the argument is that Mississippi's description of the Department's motive, if true, would refute its claim that the Attorney General intended to preclear a dual system. Indeed, only two weeks after the February 1 preclearance, the Attorney General wrote to Mississippi stating explicitly her view that its submission had not sought "preclearance for a
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