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PRESLEY v. ETOWAH COUNTY COMM’N Syllabus
(a) Allen v. State Bd. of Elections, 393 U. S. 544, and this Court’s later decisions reveal a consistent requirement that changes subject to § 5 pertain only to voting. Without implying that the four typologies exhaust the statute’s coverage, it can be said that the cases fall within one of the following contexts: (1) changes in the manner of voting; (2) changes in candidacy requirements and qualifications; (3) changes in the composition of the electorate that may vote for candidates for a given office; and (4) changes affecting the creation or abolition of an elective office. The first three categories involve changes in election procedures, while all the examples within the fourth category might be termed substantive changes as to which offices are elective. But whether the changes are of procedure or substance, each has a direct relation to voting and the election process. Pp. 500–503. (b) The Etowah County Commission’s Common Fund Resolution was not subject to § 5’s preclearance requirement. It is not a change within any of the categories recognized in Allen or the later cases; rather, it concerns only the internal operations of an elected body and the distribution of power among officials and, thus, has no direct relation to, or impact on, voting. The view advanced by appellants and the United States—to the effect that any act diminishing or increasing a local official’s power would require preclearance—would work an unconstrained expansion of § 5’s coverage beyond the statutory language and congressional intent by including innumerable enactments, such as budget measures, that alter the power and decisionmaking authority of elected officials but have nothing to do with voting, and fails to provide a workable standard for distinguishing between governmental decisions that involve voting and those that do not. Some standard is necessary, for in a real sense every decision taken by government implicates voting, yet no one would contend that Congress meant the Act to subject all or even most government decisions in covered jurisdictions to federal supervision. Pp. 503–506. (c) The Russell County Commission’s adoption of the Unit System and its concomitant transfer of operations to the county engineer do not constitute a change covered by § 5. There is not even an arguable basis for saying that the Unit System’s adoption fits within any of the first three categories of changes in voting rules that this Court has recognized. As to the fourth category, the argument that the delegation of authority to an appointed official is similar to the replacement of an elected official with an appointed one and is therefore subject to § 5 under Bunton v. Patterson, decided with Allen, supra, ignores the rationale for the Bunton holding: The practice in question changed an elective office to an appointive one. Here, the citizens of Russell County may still vote for members of the county commission. The fact that those commissioners exercise less authority than they once did is a
