Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal opinion page:

“Whatever one’s perspective on voter ID, this delay – now nearly two full election cycles – is unreasonable. As the front page story in today’s paper notes, Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann submitted the required guidelines of how the state planned to administer the law in January 2012. The state should have had an answer, one way or the other, by now.”

What is happening is that DOJ is gathering information, information willingly turned over by Mississippi, on which to base an objection to the law.  If the submission were before the United States District Court instead of the DOJ, the Rules of Evidence would limit what the Justice Department could obtain, and how it could be used.  For example, in the South Carolina voter ID case, the Justice Department used evidence obtained throughout the administrative review process to object to the law.  But the federal court later ruled that the evidence was not relevant to an objection.

This is the fundamental problem states subject to Section 5 face: the lawyers in the Voting Section see the same set of facts differently than does a federal court.  What they consider to be evidence of racial discrimination, courts do not.  That’s why submitting voter identification laws to DOJ are a step best not taken, unless you are simply willing to litigate the case in the end, and with DOJ having a big head start on your evidence.