346
Opinion of Souter, J.
About the time the Board appointed its "Community Affairs Committee," it sought preclearance under § 5 from the Attorney General for the redistricting plan before us now. The course of the Board's redistricting efforts tell us much about what it had in mind when it proposed its plan. Following the rebuff from the Police Jury, the Board was able to follow a relaxed redistricting timetable, there being no Board elections scheduled before 1994. While the Board could simply have adopted the Police Jury plan once the Attorney General had precleared it, the Board did not do so, App. to Juris. Statement 147a (Stipulation 11), despite just such a proposal from one Board member at the Board's September 5, 1991, meeting. No action was then taken on the proposal, id., at 174a (Stipulations 89-90), and although the Board issued no explanation for its inaction, it is noteworthy that the jury plan ignored some of the Board's customary districting concerns. Whereas one of those concerns was incumbency protection, see App. 251; cf. App. to Juris. Statement 152a (Stipulation 26), the jury plan would have pitted two pairs of incumbents against each other and created two districts in which no incumbent resided, id., at 181a-182a (Stipulation 109).2 The jury plan disregarded school attendance zones, and even included two districts containing no schools. Id., at 174a, 151a, 191a (Stipulations 88, 24, 141). The jury plan, moreover, called for a total variation in district populations exceeding the standard normally used to gauge satisfaction of the "one person, one vote" principle, see id., at 162a-163a (Stipulation 58); App. 231-232; 1 Tr. 147, four of its districts failed the standard measure of compactness used by the Board's own cartographer, id., at 174-176,
2 While two of the incumbents were considering stepping down by the time the Board subsequently adopted the plan, at least one of those decisions was anything but firm. See App. 103; 4 Record, Doc. No. 72, in Civ. Action No. 94-1495 (D. D. C.), pp. 60-61 (joint designations of portions of deposition of David Harvey); 1 Tr. 85.
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