Cite as: 525 U. S. 266 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
ered jurisdiction's nonlegislative, executive initiatives is not to the contrary. Such a reading poses no barrier to the view that "administer" also encompasses nondiscretionary acts by covered jurisdictions endeavoring to comply with the superior law of the State.
Nor are we persuaded that Congress' use of the word "seek" is intended to require an act of discretion by the covered jurisdiction in order to trigger the preclearance requirement. The word "seek" in this context is more readily understood as creating a temporal distinction. The Government has indicated that a covered jurisdiction need not seek preclearance before enacting legislation that would effect a voting change. See 28 CFR § 51.22(a) (1997) (listing "[a]ny proposal for a change affecting voting submitted prior to final enactment" among "premature submissions" that Attorney General will not consider); see also Tr. of Oral Arg. 20. Preclearance is required before actually administering a change, however, and use of the word "seek" in § 5 makes this distinction clear.
We note, too, that this Court has elsewhere assumed that legislation from a partially covered State must be precleared to the extent that it affects covered counties. In United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburgh, Inc. v. Carey, 430 U. S. 144 (1977), we rejected a constitutional challenge brought by Hasidic residents of Kings County, New York, to a redistricting plan enacted by the state legislature. We assumed in that case that the state plan was subject to the Act's preclearance requirements, even though the State was not a covered jurisdiction, because Kings and other counties were themselves covered by the Act. We observed that, after the State's efforts to exempt its counties from the Act's coverage proved unsuccessful, see New York ex rel. New York County v. United States, 419 U. S. 888 (1974), "it became necessary for New York [State] to secure the approval of the Attorney General or of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for its 1972 reapportion-
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