re: #2 EPR-radar

The whole point of pre-clearance in the VRA is that for a century after the civil war, every time a court bothered to look at some obviously rigged scheme to avoid compliance with the 15th amendment and knocked it out, the relevant jurisdictions would simply come up with some other way to reduce black voting.

After a while, they even started repeating plans that had been knocked out decades earlier.

Pre-clearance is the only known approach for dealing with this kind of obstinacy.

Yes, but pre-clearance itself wasn’t the issue here, since Section 5 of the VRA was held to be Constitutional. What was ruled was that Shelby County, AL, should not continue to be required to submit its election laws for pre-clearance based on a formula that measured the situation in the county 40-50 years ago.

There are almost certainly places in the US where pre-clearance is still needed. But a 1972 formula measuring data from the 1960’s is not accurate way to measure if Shelby County is still such a place in 2013.