Charles Bullock and Keith Gaddie have an article at Southern Political Report.  It has a dire prediction if jurisdictions avoid submitting redistricting plans (or voter ID laws for that matter) to the Justice Department and go straight to district court instead:

“If hundreds (or thousands) of jurisdictions doubted the fairness of DOJ and went to court, the limited number of judges would quickly become overwhelmed. DOJ’s resources would also be stretched as its attorneys respond to interrogatories, depose opposition witnesses, review expert reports, prepare their own witnesses to testify, and participate in trials. The judicial system could not cope should even a small fraction of the preclearance jurisdictions go to court.”

You don’t say.  That might be one more reason for states to pursue going to court instead, because DOJ will be ill equipped to handle the litigation as much as the Courts will.   The solution proposed in the article.:

“To avoid the potential of a judicial log-jam, DOJ attorneys would be well-served to signal to submitting authorities that they can expect treatment free of partisan overtones if they follow the administrative route to preclearance. “

Are you kidding?  What do you expect them to say, to “signal”?  Of course they will say this, but a scorpion will remain a scorpion no matter what it tells the frog.  Perhaps the frog will remind the scorpion of some cases the scorpion was involved in, including Johnson v. Miller, Hays v. Louisiana, Scott v. Department of Justice and Smith v. Beasley.