Voting Rights
Access to the Ballot
Minor v. Happersett (1876)
88 U.S. 162 (1876)
Vote: 9-0
Decision: Affirmed
Majority: Waite, joined by Clifford, Swayne, Miller, Davis, Field, Strong, Bradley, and Hunt
ERROR to the Supreme Court of Missouri; the case being thus:
The fourteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, in its first section, thus ordains:
‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law, which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction, the equal protection of the laws.’
And the constitution of the State of Missouri thus ordains:
‘Every male citizen of the United States shall be entitled to vote.’
Under a statute of the State all persons wishing to vote at any election, must previously have been registered in the manner pointed out by the statute, this being a condition precedent to the exercise of the elective franchise.
In this state of things, on the 15th of October, 1872 (one of the days fixed by law for the registration of voters), Mrs. Virginia Minor, a native born, free, white citizen of the United States, and of the State of Missouri, over the age of twenty-one years, wishing to vote for electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, and for a representative in Congress, and for other officers, at the general election held in November, 1872, applied to one Happersett, the registrar of voters, to register her as a lawful voter, which he refused to do, assigning for cause that she was not a ‘male citizen of the United States,’ but a woman. She thereupon sued him in one of the inferior State courts of Missouri, for willfully refusing to place her name upon the list of registered voters, by which refusal she was deprived of her right to vote.
The registrar demurred, and the court in which the suit was brought sustained the demurrer, and gave judgment in his favor; a judgment which the Supreme Court affirmed. Mrs. Minor now brought the case here on error.
Mr. Francis Minor (with whom were Messrs. J. M. Krum and J. B. Henderson), for the plaintiff in error, went into an elaborate argument, partially based on what he deemed true political views, and partially resting on legal and constitutional grounds. These last seemed to be thus resolvable:
1st. As a citizen of the United States, the plaintiff was entitled to any and all the ‘privileges and immunities’ that belong to such position however defined; and as are held, exercised, and enjoyed by other citizens of the United States.
2d. The elective franchise is a ‘privilege’ of citizenship, in the highest sense of the word. It is the privilege preservative of all rights and privileges; and especially of the right of the citizen to participate in his or her government.
3d. The denial or abridgment of this privilege, if it exist at all, must be sought only in the fundamental charter of government,—the Constitution of the United States. If not found there, no inferior power or jurisdiction can legally claim the right to exercise it.
4th. But the Constitution of the United States, so far from recognizing or permitting any denial or abridgment of the privileges of its citizens, expressly declares that ‘no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.’
5th. If follows that the provisions of the Missouri constitution and registry law before recited, are in conflict with and must yield to the paramount authority of the Constitution of the United States.
No opposing counsel.
The CHIEF JUSTICE delivered the opinion of the court.
The question is presented in this case, whether, since the adoption of the fourteenth amendment, a woman, who is a citizen of the United States and of the State of Missouri, is a voter in that State, notwithstanding the provision of the constitution and laws of the State, which confine the right of suffrage to men alone. …
It is contended that the provisions of the constitution and laws of the State of Missouri which confine the right of suffrage and registration therefor to men, are in violation of the Constitution of the United States, and therefore void. The argument is, that as a woman, born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, is a citizen of the United States and of the State in which she resides, she has the right of suffrage as one of the privileges and immunities of her citizenship, which the State cannot by its laws or constitution abridge.
There is no doubt that women may be citizens. They are persons, and by the fourteenth amendment “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are expressly declared to be “citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” …
If the right of suffrage is one of the necessary privileges of a citizen of the United States, then the constitution and laws of Missouri confining it to men are in violation of the Constitution of the United States, as amended, and consequently void. The direct question is, therefore, presented whether all citizens are necessarily voters.
The Constitution does not define the privileges and immunities of citizens. For that definition we must look elsewhere. In this case we need not determine what they are, but only whether suffrage is necessarily one of them.
It certainly is nowhere made so in express terms. The United States has no voters in the States of its own creation. The elective officers of the United States are all elected directly or indirectly by State voters. The members of the House of Representatives are to be chosen by the people of the States, and the electors in each State must have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislature. Senators are to be chosen by the legislatures of the States, and necessarily the members of the legislature required to make the choice are elected by the voters of the State. …
The amendment did not add to the privileges and immunities of a citizen. It simply furnished an additional guaranty for the protection of such as he already had. No new voters were necessarily made by it. Indirectly it may have had that effect, because it may have increased the number of citizens entitled to suffrage under the constitution and laws of the States, but it operates for this purpose, if at all, through the States and the State laws, and not directly upon the citizen.
It is clear, therefore, we think, that the Constitution has not added the right of suffrage to the privileges and immunities of citizenship as they existed at the time it was adopted. This makes it proper to inquire whether suffrage was coextensive with the citizenship of the States at the time of its adoption. If it was, then it may with force be argued that suffrage was one of the rights which belonged to citizenship, and in the enjoyment of which every citizen must be protected. But if it was not, the contrary may with propriety be assumed.
When the Federal Constitution was adopted, all the States, with the exception of Rhode Island and Connecticut, had constitutions of their own. These two continued to act under their charters from the Crown. Upon an examination of those constitutions we find that in no State were all citizens permitted to vote. …
In this condition of the law in respect to suffrage in the several States it cannot for a moment be doubted that if it had been intended to make all citizens of the United States voters, the framers of the Constitution would not have left it to implication. So important a change in the condition of citizenship as it actually existed, if intended, would have been expressly declared.
…
And still again, after the adoption of the fourteenth amendment, it was deemed necessary to adopt a fifteenth, as follows: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The fourteenth amendment had already provided that no State should make or enforce any law which should abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. If suffrage was one of these privileges or immunities, why amend the Constitution to prevent its being denied on account of race, &c.? Nothing is more evident than that the greater must include the less, and if all were already protected why go through with the form of amending the Constitution to protect a part?
But we have already sufficiently considered the proof found upon the inside of the Constitution. That upon the outside is equally effective.
The Constitution was submitted to the States for adoption in 1787, and was ratified by nine States in 1788, and finally by the thirteen original States in 1790. Vermont was the first new State admitted to the Union, and it came in under a constitution which conferred the right of suffrage only upon men of the full age of twenty-one years … The next year, 1792, Kentucky followed with a constitution confining the right of suffrage to free male citizens of the age of twenty-one years … Then followed Tennessee, in 1796, with voters of freemen of the age of twenty-one years and upwards … But we need not particularize further. No new State has ever been admitted to the Union which has conferred the right of suffrage upon women, and this has never been considered a valid objection to her admission. On the contrary, as is claimed in the argument, the right of suffrage was withdrawn from women as early as 1807 in the State of New Jersey, without any attempt to obtain the interference of the United States to prevent it. Since then the governments of the insurgent States have been reorganized under a requirement that before their representatives could be admitted to seats in Congress they must have adopted new constitutions, republican in form. In no one of these constitutions was suffrage conferred upon women, and yet the States have all been restored to their original position as States in the Union.
Certainly, if the courts can consider any question settled, this is one. For nearly ninety years the people have acted upon the idea that the Constitution, when it conferred citizenship, did not necessarily confer the right of suffrage. If uniform practice long continued can settle the construction of so important an instrument as the Constitution of the United States confessedly is, most certainly it has been done here. …
Being unanimously of the opinion that the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one, and that the constitutions and laws of the several States which commit that important trust to men alone are not necessarily void, we
AFFIRM THE JUDGMENT
Guinn v. United States (1915)
238 U.S. 347 (1915)
Vote: 8-0
Decision: Reversed
Majority: White, joined by McKenna, Holmes, Day, Hughes, Van Devanter, Lamar, and Pitney
Not participating: McReynolds
MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WHITE delivered the opinion of the court.
…
Suffrage in Oklahoma was regulated by § 1, Article III of the Constitution under which the State was admitted into the Union. Shortly after the admission there was submitted an amendment to the Constitution making a radical change in that article which was adopted prior to November 8, 1910. At an election for members of Congress which followed the adoption of this Amendment certain election officers in enforcing its provisions refused to allow certain negro citizens to vote who were clearly entitled to vote under the provision of the Constitution under which the State was admitted, that is, before the amendment, and who, it is equally clear, were not entitled to vote under the provision of the suffrage amendment if that amendment governed. The persons so excluded based their claim of right to vote upon the original Constitution and upon the assertion that the suffrage amendment was void because in conflict with the prohibitions of the Fifteenth Amendment and therefore afforded no basis for denying them the right guaranteed and protected by that Amendment. …
… The original clause so far as material was this:
“The qualified electors of the State shall be male citizens of the United States, male citizens of the State, and male persons of Indian descent native of the United States, who are over the age of twenty-one years, who have resided in the State one year, in the county six months, and in the election precinct thirty days, next preceding the election at which any such elector offers to vote.”
And this is the amendment:
“No person shall be registered as an elector of this State or be allowed to vote in any election herein, unless he be able to read and write any section of the constitution of the State of Oklahoma; but no person who was, on January 1, 1866, or at any time prior thereto, entitled to vote under any form of government, or who at that time resided in some foreign nation, and no lineal descendant of such person, shall be denied the right to register and vote because of his inability to so read and write sections of such constitution. …”
… No question is raised by the Government concerning the validity of the literacy test provided for in the amendment under consideration as an independent standard … The real question involved, so the argument of the Government insists, is the repugnancy of the standard which the amendment makes, based upon the conditions existing on January 1, 1866, because on its face and inherently considering the substance of things, that standard is a mere denial of the restrictions imposed by the prohibitions of the Fifteenth Amendment and by necessary result re-creates and perpetuates the very conditions which the Amendment was intended to destroy. …
The questions then are: (1) … [A]ssuming that the suffrage provision has the significance which the Government assumes it to have, is that provision as a matter of law repugnant to the Fifteenth Amendment? which leads us of course to consider the operation and effect of the Fifteenth Amendment. (2) If yes, has the assailed amendment in so far as it fixes a standard for voting as of January 1, 1866, the meaning which the Government attributes to it? which leads us to analyze and interpret that provision of the amendment. (3) If the investigation as to the two prior subjects establishes that the standard fixed as of January 1, 1866, is void, what if any effect does that conclusion have upon the literacy standard otherwise established by the amendment? … Let us consider these subjects under separate headings.
1. The operation and effect of the Fifteenth Amendment. This is its text:
“Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
“Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
(a) Beyond doubt the Amendment does not take away from the state governments in a general sense the power over suffrage which has belonged to those governments from the beginning … In fact, the very command of the Amendment recognizes the possession of the general power by the State, since the Amendment seeks to regulate its exercise as to the particular subject with which it deals.
(b) But it is equally beyond the possibility of question that the Amendment in express terms restricts the power of the United States or the States to abridge or deny the right of a citizen of the United States to vote on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude. The restriction is coincident with the power and prevents its exertion in disregard of the command of the Amendment. But while this is true, it is true also that the Amendment does not change, modify or deprive the States of their full power as to suffrage except of course as to the subject with which the Amendment deals and to the extent that obedience to its command is necessary. …
(c) While in the true sense, therefore, the Amendment gives no right of suffrage, it was long ago recognized that in operation its prohibition might measurably have that effect; that is to say that as the command of the Amendment was self-executing and reached without legislative action the conditions of discrimination against which it was aimed the result might arise that as a consequence of the striking down of a discriminating clause a right of suffrage would be enjoyed by reason of the generic character of the provision which would remain after the discrimination was stricken out Ex parte Yarbrough (1884); Neal v. Delaware (1880). …
With these principles before us how can there be room for any serious dispute concerning the repugnancy of the standard based upon January 1, 1866 (a date which preceded the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment), if the suffrage provision fixing that standard is susceptible of the significance which the Government attributes to it? Indeed, there seems no escape from the conclusion that to hold that there was even possibility for dispute on the subject would be but to declare that the Fifteenth Amendment not only had not the self-executing power which it has been recognized to have from the beginning, but that its provisions were wholly inoperative because susceptible of being rendered inapplicable by mere forms of expression embodying no exercise of judgment and resting upon no discernible reason other than the purpose to disregard the prohibitions of the Amendment by creating a standard of voting which on its face was in substance but a revitalization of conditions which when they prevailed in the past had been destroyed by the self-operative force of the Amendment.
2. The standard of January 1, 1866, fixed in the suffrage amendment and its significance.
The inquiry of course here is, Does the amendment as to the particular standard which this heading embraces involve the mere refusal to comply with the commands of the Fifteenth Amendment as previously stated? This leads us for the purpose of the analysis to recur to the text of the suffrage amendment. Its opening sentence fixes the literacy standard which is all-inclusive since it is general in its expression and contains no word of discrimination on account of race or color or any other reason. This however is immediately followed by the provisions creating the standard based upon the condition existing on January 1, 1866, and carving out those coming under that standard from the inclusion in the literacy test which would have controlled them but for the exclusion thus expressly provided for. The provision is this:
“But no person who was, on January 1, 1866, or at any time prior thereto, entitled to vote under any form of government, or who at that time resided in some foreign nation, and no lineal descendant of such person, shall be denied the right to register and vote because of his inability to so read and write sections of such constitution.”
We have difficulty in finding words to more clearly demonstrate the conviction we entertain that this standard has the characteristics which the Government attributes to it than does the mere statement of the text. It is true it contains no express words of an exclusion from the standard which it establishes of any person on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude prohibited by the Fifteenth Amendment, but the standard itself inherently brings that result into existence since it is based purely upon a period of time before the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment and makes that period the controlling and dominant test of the right of suffrage. In other words, we seek in vain for any ground which would sustain any other interpretation but that the provision, recurring to the conditions existing before the Fifteenth Amendment was adopted and the continuance of which the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited, proposed by in substance and effect lifting those conditions over to a period of time after the Amendment to make them the basis of the right to suffrage conferred in direct and positive disregard of the Fifteenth Amendment. …
And it will be so certified.
Lane v. Wilson (1939)
307 U.S. 268 (1939)
Vote: 6-2
Decision: Reversed
Majority: Frankfurter, joined by Hughes, Stone, Roberts, Black, and Reed
Dissent: McReynolds, joined by Butler
Not participating: Douglas
MR. JUSTICE FRANKFURTER delivered the opinion of the Court.
The constitution under which Oklahoma was admitted into the Union regulated the suffrage by Article III, whereby its “qualified electors” were to be “citizens of the State … who are over the age of twenty-one years” with disqualifications in the case of felons, paupers and lunatics. Soon after its admission the suffrage provisions of the Oklahoma Constitution were radically amended by the addition of a literacy test from which white voters were in effect relieved through the operation of a “grandfather clause.” The clause was stricken down by this Court as violative of the prohibition against discrimination “on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude” of the Fifteenth Amendment. This outlawry occurred on June 21, 1915. In the meantime the Oklahoma general election of 1914 had been based on the offending “grandfather clause.” After the invalidation of that clause a special session of the Oklahoma legislature enacted a new scheme for registration as a prerequisite to voting. … Section 4 of this statute (now § 5654) was obviously directed towards the consequences of the decision in Guinn v. United States (1915). Those who had voted in the general election of 1914, automatically remained qualified voters. The new registration requirements affected only others. These had to apply for registration between April 30, 1916 and May 11, 1916, if qualified at that time, with an extension to June 30, 1916, given only to those “absent from the county … during such period of time, or … prevented by sickness or unavoidable misfortune from registering … within such time.” The crux of the present controversy is the validity of this registration scheme, with its dividing line between white citizens who had voted under the “grandfather clause” immunity prior to Guinn v. United States (1915), and citizens who were outside it, and the not more than 12 days as the normal period of registration for the theretofore proscribed class.
The petitioner, a colored citizen of Oklahoma, who was the plaintiff below and will hereafter be referred to as such, sued three county election officials for declining to register him on October 17, 1934. He was qualified for registration in 1916 but did not then get on the registration list. The evidence is in conflict whether he presented himself in that year for registration and, if so, under what circumstances registration was denied him. The fact is that plaintiff did not get on the register in 1916. Under the terms of the statute he thereby permanently lost the right to register and hence the right to vote. The central claim of plaintiff is that of the unconstitutionality of § 5654. …
… The reach of the Fifteenth Amendment against contrivances by a state to thwart equality in the enjoyment of the right to vote by citizens of the United States regardless of race or color, has been amply expounded by prior decisions. Guinn v. United States (1915); Myers v. Anderson (1915). The Amendment nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination. It hits onerous procedural requirements which effectively handicap exercise of the franchise by the colored race although the abstract right to vote may remain unrestricted as to race. When in Guinn v. United States (1915), the Oklahoma “grandfather clause” was found violative of the Fifteenth Amendment, Oklahoma was confronted with the serious task of devising a new registration system consonant with her own political ideas but also consistent with the Federal Constitution. We are compelled to conclude, however reluctantly, that the legislation of 1916 partakes too much of the infirmity of the “grandfather clause” to be able to survive.
Section 5652 of the Oklahoma statutes makes registration a prerequisite to voting. By §§ 5654 and 5659 all citizens who were qualified to vote in 1916 but had not voted in 1914 were required to register, save in the exceptional circumstances, between April 30 and May 11, 1916, and in default of such registration were perpetually disenfranchised. Exemption from this onerous provision was enjoyed by all who had registered in 1914. But this registration was held under the statute which was condemned in the Guinn case. Unfair discrimination was thus retained by automatically granting voting privileges for life to the white citizens whom the constitutional “grandfather clause” had sheltered while subjecting colored citizens to a new burden. The practical effect of the 1916 legislation was to accord to the members of the negro race who had been discriminated against in the outlawed registration system of 1914, not more than 12 days within which to reassert constitutional rights which this Court found in the Guinn case to have been improperly taken from them. We believe that the opportunity thus given negro voters to free themselves from the effects of discrimination to which they should never have been subjected was too cabined and confined. … [T]he practical difficulties, of which the record in this case gives glimpses, inevitable in the administration of such strict registration provisions, leave no escape from the conclusion that the means chosen as substitutes for the invalidated “grandfather clause” were themselves invalid under the Fifteenth Amendment. They operated unfairly against the very class on whose behalf the protection of the Constitution was here successfully invoked.
Nixon v. Herndon (1927)
273 U.S. 536 (1927)
Vote: 9-0
Decision: Reversed
Majority: Homes, joined by Taft, Devanter, McReynolds, Brandeis, Sutherland, Butler, Sanford, and Stone
MR. JUSTICE HOLMES delivered the opinion of the Court.
This is an action against the Judges of Elections for refusing to permit the plaintiff to vote at a primary election in Texas. … The petition alleges that the plaintiff is a negro, a citizen of the United States and of Texas and a resident of El Paso, and in every way qualified to vote, as set forth in detail, except that the statute to be mentioned interferes with his right; that on July 26, 1924, a primary election was held at El Paso for the nomination of candidates for a senator and representatives in Congress and State and other offices, upon the Democratic ticket; that the plaintiff, being a member of the Democratic party, sought to vote but was denied the right by defendants; that the denial was based upon a Statute of Texas enacted in May, 1923, and designated Article 3093a, by the words of which “in no event shall a negro be eligible to participate in a Democratic party primary election held in the State of Texas,” &c., and that this statute is contrary to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. …
The important question is whether the statute can be sustained. But although we state it as a question the answer does not seem to us open to a doubt. We find it unnecessary to consider the Fifteenth Amendment, because it seems to us hard to imagine a more direct and obvious infringement of the Fourteenth. That Amendment, while it applies to all, was passed, as we know, with a special intent to protect the blacks from discrimination against them. Slaughter House Cases. Strauder v. West Virginia (1880). That Amendment “not only gave citizenship and the privileges of citizenship to persons of color, but it denied to any State the power to withhold from them the equal protection of the laws. … The statute of Texas in the teeth of the prohibitions referred to assumes to forbid negroes to take part in a primary election the importance of which we have indicated, discriminating against them by the distinction of color alone. States may do a good deal of classifying that it is difficult to believe rational, but there are limits, and it is too clear for extended argument that color cannot be made the basis of a statutory classification affecting the right set up in this case
Judgment reversed.
Nixon v. Condon (1932)
286 U.S. 73 (1932)
Vote: 5-4
Decision: Reversed
Majority: Cardozo, joined by Hughes, Brandeis, Stone, and Roberts
Dissent: McReynolds, joined by Van Devanter, Sutherland, and Butler
MR. JUSTICE CARDOZO delivered the opinion of the Court.
The petitioner, a Negro, has brought this action against judges of election in Texas to recover damages for their refusal by reason of his race or color to permit him to cast his vote at a primary election.
This is not the first time that he has found it necessary to invoke the jurisdiction of the federal courts in vindication of privileges secured to him by the Federal Constitution.
In Nixon v. Herndon (1927), decided at the October Term, 1926, this court had before it a statute of the State of Texas whereby the legislature had said that “in no event shall a negro be eligible to participate in a democratic party primary election [held in that State],” … At the suit of this petitioner, the statute was adjudged void as an infringement of his rights and liberties under the Constitution of the United States.
Promptly after the announcement of that decision, the legislature of Texas enacted a new statute repealing the article condemned by this court; declaring that the effect of the decision was to create an emergency with a need for immediate action; and substituting for the article so repealed another bearing the same number. By the article thus substituted, “every political party in this State through its State Executive Committee shall have the power to prescribe the qualifications of its own members and shall in its own way determine who shall be qualified to vote or otherwise participate in such political party …”
Acting under the new statute, the State Executive Committee of the Democratic party adopted a resolution “that all white democrats who are qualified under the constitution and laws of Texas … and none other, be allowed to participate in the primary elections to be held July 28, 1928, and August 25, 1928,” …
On July 28, 1928, the petitioner, a citizen of the United States, and qualified to vote unless disqualified by the foregoing resolution, presented himself at the polls and requested that he be furnished with a ballot. The respondents, the judges of election, declined to furnish the ballot or to permit the vote on the ground that the petitioner was a Negro and that by force of the resolution of the Executive Committee only white Democrats were allowed to be voters at the Democratic primary. …
Whether a political party in Texas has inherent power today without restraint by any law to determine its own membership, we are not required at this time either to affirm or to deny. …
A narrower base will serve for our judgment in the cause at hand. … Whatever our conclusion might be if the statute had remitted to the party the untrammeled power to prescribe the qualifications of its members, nothing of the kind was done. Instead, the statute lodged the power in a committee, which excluded the petitioner and others of his race, not by virtue of any authority delegated by the party, but by virtue of an authority originating or supposed to originate in the mandate of the law. …
… The pith of the matter is simply this, that when those agencies are invested with an authority independent of the will of the association in whose name they undertake to speak, they become to that extent the organs of the State itself, the repositories of official power. They are then the governmental instruments whereby parties are organized and regulated to the end that government itself may be established or continued. What they do in that relation, they must do in submission to the mandates of equality and liberty that bind officials everywhere. …
With the problem thus laid bare and its essentials exposed to view, the case is seen to be ruled by Nixon v. Herndon (1927). Delegates of the State’s power have discharged their official functions in such a way as to discriminate invidiously between white citizens and black. The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted as it was with special solicitude for the equal protection of members of the Negro race, lays a duty upon the court to level by its judgment these barriers of color.
The judgment below is reversed and the cause remanded for further proceedings in conformity with this opinion.
Reversed.
Grovey v. Townsend (1935)
265 U.S. 45 (1935)
Vote: 9-0
Decision: Affirmed
Majority: Roberts, joined by Hughes, Devanter, McReynolds, Brandeis, Sutherland, Butler, Stone, and Cardozo
MR. JUSTICE ROBERTS delivered the opinion of the Court.
The petitioner, by complaint filed in the Justice Court of Harris County, Texas, alleged that although he is a citizen of the United States and of the State and County, and a member of and believer in the tenets of the Democratic party, the respondent, the county clerk, a state officer, having as such only public functions to perform, refused him a ballot for a Democratic party primary election, because he is of the negro race. … Referring to statutes which regulate absentee voting at primary elections, the complaint states the petitioner expected to be absent from the county on the date of the primary election, and demanded of the respondent an absentee ballot, which was refused him in virtue of a resolution of the state Democratic convention of Texas, adopted May 24, 1932, which is:
“Be it resolved, that all white citizens of the State of Texas who are qualified to vote under the Constitution and laws of the state shall be eligible to membership in the Democratic party and as such entitled to participate in its deliberations.”
The complaint charges that the respondent acted without legal excuse and his wrongful and unlawful acts constituted a violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Federal Constitution. …
The charge is that respondent, a state officer, in refusing to furnish petitioner a ballot, obeyed the law of Texas, and the consequent denial of petitioner’s right to vote in the primary election because of his race and color was state action forbidden by the Federal Constitution; and it is claimed that former decisions require us so to hold. The cited cases are, however, not in point. In Nixon v. Herndon (1927), a statute which enacted that “in no event shall a negro be eligible to participate in a Democratic party primary election held in the State of Texas,” was pronounced offensive to the Fourteenth Amendment. In Nixon v. Condon (1932), a statute was drawn in question which provided that “every political party in this State through its State Executive Committee shall have the power to prescribe the qualifications of its own members and shall in its own way determine who shall be qualified to vote or otherwise participate in such political party.” We held this was a delegation of state power to the state executive committee and made its determination conclusive irrespective of any expression of the party’s will by its convention, and therefore the committee’s action barring negroes from the party primaries was state action prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment. Here the qualifications of citizens to participate in party counsels and to vote at party primaries have been declared by the representatives of the party in convention assembled, and this action upon its face is not state action. …
Judgment affirmed.
(Overturned by Smith v. Allwright)
U.S. v. Classic (1941)
313 U.S. 299 (1941)
Vote: 4-3
Decision: Reversed
Majority: Stone, joined by Roberts, Reed, and Frankfurter
Dissent: Douglas, joined by Black, and Murphy
Not participating: Chief Justice Hughes
Mr. Justice Stone delivered the opinion of the Court:
Two counts of an indictment found in a federal district court charged that appellees, Commissioners of Elections, conducting a primary election under Louisiana law to nominate a candidate of the Democratic Party for representative in Congress, willfully altered and falsely counted and certified the ballots of voters cast in the primary election. The questions for decision are whether the right of qualified voters to vote in the Louisiana primary and to have their ballots counted is a right “secured by the Constitution” within the meaning of § 19 and 20 of the Criminal Code, and whether the acts of appellees charged in the indictment violate those sections.
…
The Government argues that the right of a qualified voter in a Louisiana congressional primary election to have his vote counted and cast is a right secured by Article I, §§ 2 and 4 of the Constitution, and that a conspiracy to deprive the citizen of that right is a violation of § 19, and also that the willful action of appellees as state officials, in falsely counting the ballots at the primary election and in falsely certifying the count, deprived qualified voters of that right and of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment …
We look then to the statutes of Louisiana here involved to ascertain the nature of the right which under the constitutional mandate they define and confer on the voter, and the effect upon its exercise of the acts with which appellees are charged, all with the view to determining, first, whether the right or privilege is one secured by the Constitution of the United States, second, whether the effect under the state statute of appellees’ alleged acts is such that they operate to injure or oppress citizens in the exercise of that right within the meaning of § 19 and to deprive inhabitants of the state of that right within the meaning of § 20, and finally, whether §§ 19 and 20, respectively, are in other respects applicable to the alleged acts of appellees.
…
Pursuant to the authority given by § 2 of Article I of the Constitution, and subject to the legislative power of Congress under § 4 of Article I, and other pertinent provisions of the Constitution, the states are given, and in fact exercise, a wide discretion in the formulation of a system for the choice by the people of representatives in Congress. In common with many other states, Louisiana has exercised that discretion by setting up machinery for the effective choice of party candidates for representative in Congress by primary elections, and, by its laws, it eliminates or seriously restricts the candidacy at the general election of all those who are defeated at the primary …
The primary is conducted by the state at public expense. Act No. 46, supra, § 35. The primary, as is the general election, is subject to numerous statutory regulations as to the time, place and manner of conducting the election …
Interference with the right to vote in the Congressional primary in the Second Congressional District for the choice of Democratic candidate for Congress is thus, as a matter of law and in fact, an interference with the effective choice of the voters at the only stage of the election procedure when their choice is of significance, since it is at the only stage when such interference could have any practical effect on the ultimate result, the choice of the Congressman to represent the district. The primary in Louisiana is an integral part of the procedure for the popular choice of Congressman. The right of qualified voters to vote at the Congressional primary in Louisiana and to have their ballots counted is thus the right to participate in that choice.
We come then to the question whether that right is one secured by the Constitution. Section 2 of Article I commands that Congressmen shall be chosen by the people of the several states by electors, the qualifications of which it prescribes. The right of the people to choose, whatever its appropriate constitutional limitations, where in other respects it is defined, and the mode of its exercise is prescribed by state action in conformity to the Constitution, is a right established and guaranteed by the Constitution, and hence is one secured by it to those citizens and inhabitants of the state entitled to exercise the right.
…
Obviously included within the right to choose, secured by the Constitution is the right of qualified voters within a state to cast their ballots and have them counted at Congressional elections. This Court has consistently held that this is a right secured by the Constitution.
…
But we are now concerned with the question whether the right to choose at a primary election, a candidate for election as representative, is embraced in the right to choose representatives secured by Article I, § 2.
… But, in determining whether a provision of the Constitution applies to a new subject matter, it is of little significance that it is one with which the framers were not familiar. For, in setting up an enduring framework of government, they undertook to carry out for the indefinite future, and in all the vicissitudes of the changing affairs of men, those fundamental purposes which the instrument itself discloses. Hence, we read its words not as we read legislative codes which are subject to continuous revision with the changing course of events, but as the revelation of the great purposes which were intended to be achieved by the Constitution as a continuing instrument of government. If we remember that “it is a Constitution we are expounding,” we cannot rightly prefer, of the possible meanings of its words, that which will defeat, rather than effectuate, the constitutional purpose.
That the free choice by the people of representatives in Congress, subject only to the restrictions to be found in §§ 2 and 4 of Article I and elsewhere in the Constitution, was one of the great purposes of our constitutional scheme of government cannot be doubted. We cannot regard it as any the less the constitutional purpose, or its words as any the less guarantying the integrity of that choice, when a state, exercising its privilege in the absence of Congressional action, changes the mode of choice from a single step, a general election, to two, of which the first is the choice at a primary of those candidates from whom, as a second step, the representative in Congress is to be chosen at the election. Nor can we say that that choice which the Constitution protects is restricted to the second step because § 4 of Article I, as a means of securing a free choice of representatives by the people, has authorized Congress to regulate the manner of elections, without making any mention of primary elections. For we think that the authority of Congress, given by § 4, includes the authority to regulate primary elections when, as in this case, they are a step in the exercise by the people of their choice of representatives in Congress.
…
Unless the constitutional protection of the integrity of “elections” extends to primary elections, Congress is left powerless to effect the constitutional purpose, and the popular choice of representatives is stripped of its constitutional protection save only as Congress, by taking over the control of state elections, may exclude from them the influence of the state primaries. Such an expedient would end that state autonomy with respect to elections which the Constitution contemplated that Congress should be free to leave undisturbed, subject only to such minimum regulation as it should find necessary to insure the freedom and integrity of the choice. Words, especially those of a constitution, are not to be read with such stultifying narrowness. The words of §§ 2 and 4 of Article I, read in the sense which is plainly permissible and in the light of the constitutional purpose, require us to hold that a primary election which involves a necessary step in the choice of candidates for election as representatives in Congress, and which, in the circumstances of this case, controls that choice, is an election within the meaning of the constitutional provision, and is subject to congressional regulation as to the manner of holding it.
Not only does § 4 of Article I authorize Congress to regulate the manner of holding elections, but, by Article I, § 8, Clause 18, Congress is given authority
“to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States or in any department or officer thereof.”
This provision leaves to the Congress the choice of means by which its constitutional powers are to be carried into execution.
“Let the end be legitimate; let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, are constitutional.”
McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). That principle has been consistently adhered to and liberally applied, and extends to the congressional power by appropriate legislation to safeguard the right of choice by the people of representatives in Congress, secured by § 2 of Article I.
…
We think that § 20 authorizes the punishment of two different offenses. The one is willfully subjecting any inhabitant to the deprivation of rights secured by the Constitution; the other is willfully subjecting any inhabitant to different punishments on account of his alienage, color, or race than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens. The meager legislative history of the section supports this conclusion. So interpreted, § 20 applies to deprivation of the constitutional rights of qualified voters to choose representatives in Congress. The generality of the section, made applicable as it is to deprivations of any constitutional right, does not obscure its meaning or impair its force within the scope of its application, which is restricted, by its terms, to deprivations which are willfully inflicted by those acting under color of any law, statute and the like.
MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS, dissenting.
Free and honest elections are the very foundation of our republican form of government. Hence, any attempt to defile the sanctity of the ballot cannot be viewed with equanimity. As stated by Mr. Justice Miller in Ex parte Yarbrough (1884), “the temptations to control these elections by violence and corruption” have been a constant source of danger in the history of all republics. The acts here charged, if proven, are of a kind which carries that threat, and are highly offensive. Since they corrupt the process of Congressional elections, they transcend mere local concern and extend a contaminating influence into the national domain.
I think Congress has ample power to deal with them. That is to say, I disagree with Newberry v. United States (1921) to the extent that it holds that Congress has no power to control primary elections …
[Art I, §2, §4 & §8] are an arsenal of power ample to protect Congressional elections from any and all forms of pollution. The fact that a particular form of pollution has only an indirect effect on the final election is immaterial. The fact that it occurs in a primary election or nominating convention is likewise irrelevant. The important consideration is that the Constitution should be interpreted broadly, so as to give to the representatives of a free people abundant power to deal with all the exigencies of the electoral process. It means that the Constitution should be read so as to give Congress an expansive implied power to place beyond the pale acts which, in their direct or indirect effect, impair the integrity of Congressional elections. For when corruption enters, the election is no longer free, the choice of the people is affected. To hold that Congress is powerless to control these primaries would indeed be a narrow construction of the Constitution, inconsistent with the view that that instrument of government was designed not only for contemporary needs, but for the vicissitudes of time.
So I agree with most of the views expressed in the opinion of the Court. And it is with diffidence that I dissent
from the result there reached.
Smith v. Allwright (1944)
321 U.S. 649 (1944)
Vote: 7-1
Decision: Reversed
Majority: Reed, joined by Stone, Black, Murphy, Jackson, and Rutledge
Concurrence: Frankfurter
Dissent: Roberts
MR. JUSTICE REED delivered the opinion of the Court.
This writ of certiorari brings here for review a claim for damages … on the part of petitioner, a Negro citizen of the 48th precinct of Harris County, Texas, for the refusal of respondents, election and associate election judges respectively of that precinct, to give petitioner a ballot or to permit him to cast a ballot in the primary election of July 27, 1940, for the nomination of Democratic candidates for the United States Senate and House of Representatives, and Governor and other state officers. The refusal is alleged to have been solely because of the race and color of the proposed voter.
The actions of respondents are said to violate … the Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Seventeenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. The suit was filed in the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of Texas …
The District Court denied the relief sought and the Circuit Court of Appeals quite properly affirmed its action on the authority of Grovey v. Townsend (1935). We granted the petition for certiorari to resolve a claimed inconsistency between the decision in the Grovey case and that of United States v. Classic (1941).
The State of Texas by its Constitution and statutes provides that every person, if certain other requirements are met which are not here in issue, qualified by residence in the district or county “shall be deemed a qualified elector.” Primary elections for United States Senators, Congressmen and state officers are provided for by Chapters Twelve and Thirteen of the statutes. Under these chapters, the Democratic party was required to hold the primary which was the occasion of the alleged wrong to petitioner. … These nominations are to be made by the qualified voters of the party. …
The Democratic party on May 24, 1932, in a state convention adopted the following resolution, which has not since been “amended, abrogated, annulled or avoided”:
“Be it resolved that all white citizens of the State of Texas who are qualified to vote under the Constitution and laws of the State shall be eligible to membership in the Democratic party and, as such, entitled to participate in its deliberations.”
It was by virtue of this resolution that the respondents refused to permit the petitioner to vote.
Texas is free to conduct her elections and limit her electorate as she may deem wise, save only as her action may be affected by the prohibitions of the United States Constitution or in conflict with powers delegated to and exercised by the National Government. The Fourteenth Amendment forbids a State from making or enforcing any law which abridges the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States and the Fifteenth Amendment specifically interdicts any denial or abridgement by a State of the right of citizens to vote on account of color. …
The right of a Negro to vote in the Texas primary has been considered heretofore by this Court …
In Grovey v. Townsend (1935) this Court had before it another suit for damages for the refusal in a primary of a county clerk, a Texas officer with only public functions to perform, to furnish petitioner, a Negro, an absentee ballot. The refusal was solely on the ground of race … It was decided that the determination by the state convention of the membership of the Democratic party made a significant change from a determination by the Executive Committee. The former was party action, voluntary in character. The latter, as had been held in the Condon case, was action by authority of the State. … Consequently, there was found no ground for holding that the county clerk’s refusal of a ballot because of racial ineligibility for party membership denied the petitioner any right under the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment.
Since Grovey v. Townsend (1935) and prior to the present suit, no case from Texas involving primary elections has been before this Court. We did decide, however, United States v. Classic (1941). We there held that § 4 of Article I of the Constitution authorized Congress to regulate primary as well as general elections, “where the primary is by law made an integral part of the election machinery.” … This decision depended, too, on the determination that under the Louisiana statutes the primary was a part of the procedure for choice of federal officials. By this decision the doubt as to whether or not such primaries were a part of “elections” subject to federal control … was erased. … As the Louisiana statutes for holding primaries are similar to those of Texas, our ruling in Classic as to the unitary character of the electoral process calls for a reexamination as to whether or not the exclusion of Negroes from a Texas party primary was state action.
The statutes of Texas relating to primaries and the resolution of the Democratic party of Texas extending the privileges of membership to white citizens only are the same in substance and effect today as they were when Grovey v. Townsend (1935) was decided by a unanimous Court. The question as to whether the exclusionary action of the party was the action of the State persists as the determinative factor. …
It may now be taken as a postulate that the right to vote in such a primary for the nomination of candidates without discrimination by the State, like the right to vote in a general election, is a right secured by the Constitution. By the terms of the Fifteenth Amendment that right may not be abridged by any State on account of race. Under our Constitution the great privilege of the ballot may not be denied a man by the State because of his color.
We are thus brought to an examination of the qualifications for Democratic primary electors in Texas, to determine whether state action or private action has excluded Negroes from participation. Despite Texas’ decision that the exclusion is produced by private or party action … federal courts must for themselves appraise the facts leading to that conclusion. Texas requires electors in a primary to pay a poll tax. Every person who does so pay and who has the qualifications of age and residence is an acceptable voter for the primary … Texas requires by the law the election of the county officers of a party. … Precinct primary election officers are named by the county executive committee. Statutes provide for the election by the voters of precinct delegates to the county convention of a party and the selection of delegates to the district and state conventions by the county convention. The state convention selects the state executive committee. No convention may place in platform or resolution any demand for specific legislation without endorsement of such legislation by the voters in a primary. Texas thus directs the selection of all party officers.
Primary elections are conducted by the party under state statutory authority. The county executive committee selects precinct election officials and the county, district or state executive committees, respectively, canvass the returns. These party committees or the state convention certify the party’s candidates to the appropriate officers for inclusion on the official ballot for the general election. No name which has not been so certified may appear upon the ballot for the general election as a candidate of a political party. No other name may be printed on the ballot which has not been placed in nomination by qualified voters who must take oath that they did not participate in a primary for the selection of a candidate for the office for which the nomination is made. …
We think that this statutory system for the selection of party nominees for inclusion on the general election ballot makes the party which is required to follow these legislative directions an agency of the State in so far as it determines the participants in a primary election. The party takes its character as a state agency from the duties imposed upon it by state statutes; the duties do not become matters of private law because they are performed by a political party. … When primaries become a part of the machinery for choosing officials, state and national, as they have here, the same tests to determine the character of discrimination or abridgement should be applied to the primary as are applied to the general election. If the State requires a certain electoral procedure, prescribes a general election ballot made up of party nominees so chosen and limits the choice of the electorate in general elections for state offices, practically speaking, to those whose names appear on such a ballot, it endorses, adopts and enforces the discrimination against Negroes, practiced by a party entrusted by Texas law with the determination of the qualifications of participants in the primary. This is state action within the meaning of the Fifteenth Amendment. Guinn v. United States (1915).
The United States is a constitutional democracy. Its organic law grants to all citizens a right to participate in the choice of elected officials without restriction by any State because of race. This grant to the people of the opportunity for choice is not to be nullified by a State through casting its electoral process in a form which permits a private organization to practice racial discrimination in the election. Constitutional rights would be of little value if they could be thus indirectly denied. Lane v. Wilson (1939).
The privilege of membership in a party may be, as this Court said in Grovey v. Townsend (1935), no concern of a State. But when, as here, that privilege is also the essential qualification for voting in a primary to select nominees for a general election, the State makes the action of the party the action of the State. In reaching this conclusion we are not unmindful of the desirability of continuity of decision in constitutional questions. However, when convinced of former error, this Court has never felt constrained to follow precedent. In constitutional questions, where correction depends upon amendment and not upon legislative action this Court throughout its history has freely exercised its power to reexamine the basis of its constitutional decisions. This has long been accepted practice, and this practice has continued to this day. This is particularly true when the decision believed erroneous is the application of a constitutional principle rather than an interpretation of the Constitution to extract the principle itself. Here we are applying, contrary to the recent decision in Grovey v. Townsend (1935), the well-established principle of the Fifteenth Amendment, forbidding the abridgement by a State of a citizen’s right to vote. Grovey v. Townsend (1935) is overruled.
Judgment reversed.
Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections (1959)
360 U.S. 45 (1959)
Vote: 9-0
Decision: Affirmed
Majority: Douglas, joined by Warren, Black, Frankfurter, Clark, Harlan, Brennan, Whittaker, and Stewart
MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS delivered the opinion of the Court.
This controversy started in a Federal District Court. Appellant, a Negro citizen of North Carolina, sued to have the literacy test for voters prescribed by that State declared unconstitutional and void. …
… Appellant applied for registration as a voter. Her registration was denied by the registrar because she refused to submit to a literacy test as required by the North Carolina statute. She appealed to the County Board of Elections. On the de novo hearing before that Board appellant again refused to take the literacy test and she was again denied registration for that reason. She appealed to the Superior Court which sustained the Board against the claim that the requirement of the literacy test violated the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Seventeenth Amendments of the Federal Constitution. Preserving her federal question, she appealed to the North Carolina Supreme Court which affirmed the lower court. The case came here by appeal, and we noted probable jurisdiction. …
We come then to the question whether a State may consistently with the Fourteenth and Seventeenth Amendments apply a literacy test to all voters irrespective of race or color. …
The States have long been held to have broad powers to determine the conditions under which the right of suffrage may be exercised, absent of course the discrimination which the Constitution condemns. … So while the right of suffrage is established and guaranteed by the Constitution it is subject to the imposition of state standards which are not discriminatory and which do not contravene any restriction that Congress, acting pursuant to its constitutional powers, has imposed. …
We do not suggest that any standards which a State desires to adopt may be required of voters. But there is wide scope for exercise of its jurisdiction. Residence requirements, age, previous criminal record (Davis v. Beason (1890)) are obvious examples indicating factors which a State may take into consideration in determining the qualifications of voters. The ability to read and write likewise has some relation to standards designed to promote intelligent use of the ballot. Literacy and illiteracy are neutral on race, creed, color, and sex, as reports around the world show. Literacy and intelligence are obviously not synonymous. Illiterate people may be intelligent voters. Yet in our society where newspapers, periodicals, books, and other printed matter canvass and debate campaign issues, a State might conclude that only those who are literate should exercise the franchise. It was said last century in Massachusetts that a literacy test was designed to insure an “independent and intelligent” exercise of the right of suffrage. Stone v. Smith (Massachusetts Supreme Court). North Carolina agrees. We do not sit in judgment on the wisdom of that policy. We cannot say, however, that it is not an allowable one measured by constitutional standards.
Of course a literacy test, fair on its face, may be employed to perpetuate that discrimination which the Fifteenth Amendment was designed to uproot. No such influence is charged here. On the other hand, a literacy test may be unconstitutional on its face. In Davis v. Schnell (1949) the test was the citizen’s ability to “understand and explain” an article of the Federal Constitution. The legislative setting of that provision and the great discretion it vested in the registrar made clear that a literacy requirement was merely a device to make racial discrimination easy.
We cannot make the same inference here. The present requirement, applicable to members of all races, is that the prospective voter “be able to read and write any section of the Constitution of North Carolina in the English language.” That seems to us to be one fair way of determining whether a person is literate, not a calculated scheme to lay springes for the citizen. Certainly we cannot condemn it on its face as a device unrelated to the desire of North Carolina to raise the standards for people of all races who cast the ballot.
Affirmed.
Louisiana v. United States (1965)
380 U.S. 145 (1965)
Vote: 9-0
Decision: Affirmed
Majority: Black, joined by Warren, Douglas, Clark, Brennan, Stewart, White, Goldberg
Concurrence: Harlan
MR. JUSTICE BLACK delivered the opinion of the Court.
… [B]eginning with the adoption of the Louisiana Constitution of 1898, when approximately 44% of all the registered voters in the State were Negroes, the State had put into effect a successful policy of denying Negro citizens the right to vote because of their race. The 1898 constitution adopted what was known as a “grandfather clause,” … Such a transparent expedient for disfranchising Negroes … was held unconstitutional in 1915 … Guinn v. United States (1915). Soon after that decision Louisiana, in 1921, adopted a new constitution replacing the repudiated “grandfather clause” with what the complaint calls an “interpretation test,” which required that an applicant for registration be able to “give a reasonable interpretation” of any clause in the Louisiana Constitution or the Constitution of the United States. From the adoption of the 1921 interpretation test until 1944, the District Court’s opinion stated, the percentage of registered voters in Louisiana who were Negroes never exceeded one percent. Prior to 1944 Negro interest in voting in Louisiana had been slight, largely because the State’s white primary law kept Negroes from voting in the Democratic Party primary election, the only election that mattered in the political climate of that State. In 1944, however, this Court invalidated the substantially identical white primary law of Texas, and with the explicit statutory bar to their voting in the primary removed and because of a generally heightened political interest, Negroes in increasing numbers began to register in Louisiana. The white primary system had been so effective in barring Negroes from voting that the “interpretation test” as a disfranchising device had been ignored over the years. Many registrars continued to ignore it after 1944, and in the next dozen years the proportion of registered voters who were Negroes rose from two-tenths of one percent to approximately 15% by March 1956. This fact, coupled with this Court’s 1954 invalidation of laws requiring school segregation, prompted the State to try new devices to keep the white citizens in control. The Louisiana Legislature created a committee which became known as the “Segregation Committee” to seek means of accomplishing this goal. The chairman of this committee also helped to organize a semiprivate group called the Association of Citizens Councils, which thereafter acted in close cooperation with the legislative committee to preserve white supremacy. The legislative committee and the Citizens Councils set up programs, which parish voting registrars were required to attend, to instruct the registrars on how to promote white political control. … Beginning in the middle 1950’s registrars of at least 21 parishes began to apply the interpretation test. In 1960 the State Constitution was amended to require every applicant thereafter to “be able to understand” as well as “give a reasonable interpretation” of any section of the State or Federal Constitution “when read to him by the registrar.” The State Board of Registration in cooperation with the Segregation Committee issued orders that all parish registrars must strictly comply with the new provisions.
The interpretation test, the court found, vested in the voting registrars a virtually uncontrolled discretion as to who should vote and who should not. Under the State’s statutes and constitutional provisions the registrars, without any objective standard to guide them, determine the manner in which the interpretation test is to be given, whether it is to be oral or written, the length and complexity of the sections of the State or Federal Constitution to be understood and interpreted, and what interpretation is to be considered correct. There was ample evidence to support the District Court’s finding that registrars in the 21 parishes where the test was found to have been used had exercised their broad powers to deprive otherwise qualified Negro citizens of their right to vote; and that the existence of the test as a hurdle to voter qualification has in itself deterred and will continue to deter Negroes from attempting to register in Louisiana.
Because of the virtually unlimited discretion vested by the Louisiana laws in the registrars of voters, and because in the 21 parishes where the interpretation test was applied that discretion had been exercised to keep Negroes from voting because of their race, the District Court held the interpretation test invalid on its face and as applied, as a violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution …
… There can be no doubt from the evidence in this case that the District Court was amply justified in finding that Louisiana’s interpretation test, as written and as applied, was part of a successful plan to deprive Louisiana Negroes of their right to vote. This device for accomplishing unconstitutional discrimination has been little if any less successful than was the “grandfather clause” invalidated by this Court’s decision in Guinn v. United States, supra, 50 years ago, which when that clause was adopted in 1898 had seemed to the leaders of Louisiana a much preferable way of assuring white political supremacy. The Governor of Louisiana stated in 1898 that he believed that the “grandfather clause” solved the problem of keeping Negroes from voting “in a much more upright and manly fashion” than the method adopted previously by the States of Mississippi and South Carolina, which left the qualification of applicants to vote “largely to the arbitrary discretion of the officers administering the law.” …
But Louisiana of a later generation did place just such arbitrary power in the hands of election officers who have used it with phenomenal success to keep Negroes from voting in the State. The State admits that the statutes and provisions of the state constitution establishing the interpretation test “vest discretion in the registrars of voters to determine the qualifications of applicants for registration” while imposing “no definite and objective standards upon registrars of voters for the administration of the interpretation test.” … The applicant facing a registrar in Louisiana thus has been compelled to leave his voting fate to that official’s uncontrolled power to determine whether the applicant’s understanding of the Federal or State Constitution is satisfactory. As the evidence showed, colored people, even some with the most advanced education and scholarship, were declared by voting registrars with less education to have an unsatisfactory understanding of the Constitution of Louisiana or of the United States. This is not a test but a trap, sufficient to stop even the most brilliant man on his way to the voting booth. The cherished right of people in a country like ours to vote cannot be obliterated by the use of laws like this, which leave the voting fate of a citizen to the passing whim or impulse of an individual registrar. Many of our cases have pointed out the invalidity of laws so completely devoid of standards and restraints. … We likewise affirm here the District Court’s holding that the provisions of the Louisiana Constitution and statutes which require voters to satisfy registrars of their ability to “understand and give a reasonable interpretation of any section” of the Federal or Louisiana Constitution violate the Constitution. And we agree with the District Court that it specifically conflicts with the prohibitions against discrimination in voting because of race found … in the Fifteenth Amendment … to subject citizens to such an arbitrary power as Louisiana has given its registrars under these laws.
Affirmed.
Carrington v. Rash (1965)
380 U.S. 89 (1965)
Vote: 8-1
Decision: Reversed
Majority: Stewart, joined by Black, Douglas, Clark, Brennan, Stewart, White, and Goldberg
Dissent: Harlan
Not participating: Warren
MR. JUSTICE STEWART delivered the opinion of the Court.
A provision of the Texas Constitution prohibits “[a]ny member of the Armed Forces of the United States” who moves his home to Texas during the course of his military duty from ever voting in any election in that State “so long as he or she is a member of the Armed Forces.” The question presented is whether this provision, as construed by the Supreme Court of Texas in the present case, deprives the petitioner of a right secured by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court of Texas decided that it does not and refused to issue a writ of mandamus ordering petitioner’s local election officials to permit him to vote, two Justices dissenting. We granted certiorari.
The petitioner, a sergeant in the United States Army, entered the service from Alabama in 1946 at the age of 18. The State concedes that he has been domiciled in Texas since 1962, and that he intends to make his home there permanently. He has purchased a house in El Paso where he lives with his wife and two children. He is also the proprietor of a small business there. The petitioner’s post of military duty is not in Texas, but at White Sands, New Mexico. He regularly commutes from his home in El Paso to his Army job at White Sands. He pays property taxes in Texas and has his automobile registered there. But for his uniform, the State concedes that the petitioner would be eligible to vote in El Paso County, Texas.
Texas has unquestioned power to impose reasonable residence restrictions on the availability of the ballot. Pope v. Williams (1904). There can be no doubt either of the historic function of the States to establish, on a nondiscriminatory basis, and in accordance with the Constitution, other qualifications for the exercise of the franchise. Indeed, “[t]he States have long been held to have broad powers to determine the conditions under which the right of suffrage may be exercised.” Lassiter v. Northampton Election Bd. (1959). …
This Texas constitutional provision, however, is unique. Texas has said that no serviceman may ever acquire a voting residence in the State so long as he remains in service. …
It is argued that this absolute denial of the vote to servicemen like the petitioner fulfills two purposes. First, the State says it has a legitimate interest in immunizing its elections from the concentrated balloting of military personnel, whose collective voice may overwhelm a small local civilian community. Secondly, the State says it has a valid interest in protecting the franchise from infiltration by transients, and it can reasonably assume that those servicemen who fall within the constitutional exclusion will be within the State for only a short period of time.
The theory underlying the State’s first contention is that the Texas constitutional provision is necessary to prevent the danger of a “takeover” of the civilian community resulting from concentrated voting by large numbers of military personnel in bases placed near Texas towns and cities. A base commander, Texas suggests, who opposes local police administration or teaching policies in local schools, might influence his men to vote in conformity with his predilections. Local bond issues may fail, and property taxes stagnate at low levels because military personnel are unwilling to invest in the future of the area. We stress—and this a theme to be reiterated —that Texas has the right to require that all military personnel enrolled to vote be bona fide residents of the community. But if they are in fact residents, with the intention of making Texas their home indefinitely, they, as all other qualified residents, have a right to an equal opportunity for political representation. “Fencing out” from the franchise a sector of the population because of the way they may vote is constitutionally impermissible.”[T]he exercise of rights so vital to the maintenance of democratic institutions,” Schneider v. State (1939), cannot constitutionally be obliterated because of a fear of the political views of a particular group of bona fide residents. Yet, that is what Texas claims to have done here.
The State’s second argument is that its voting ban is justified because of the transient nature of service in the Armed Forces. As the Supreme Court of Texas stated: “Persons in military service are subject at all times to reassignment, and hence to a change in their actual residence … they do not elect to be where they are. Their reasons for being where they are … cannot be the same as [those of] the permanent residents.” The Texas Constitution provides that a United States citizen can become a qualified elector if he has “resided in this State one (1) year next preceding an election and the last six (6) months within the district or county in which such person offers to vote.” It is the integrity of this qualification of residence which Texas contends is protected by the voting ban on members of the Armed Forces.
But only where military personnel are involved has Texas been unwilling to develop more precise tests to determine the bona fides of an individual claiming to have actually made his home in the State long enough to vote. … By statute, Texas deals with particular categories of citizens who, like soldiers, present specialized problems in determining residence. Students at colleges and universities in Texas, patients in hospitals and other institutions within the State, and civilian employees of the United States Government may be as transient as military personnel. But all of them are given at least an opportunity to show the election officials that they are bona fide residents.
Indeed, Texas has been able, in other areas, to winnow successfully from the ranks of the military those whose residence in the State is bona fide. …
We deal here with matters close to the core of our constitutional system.”The right … to choose,” United States v. Classic (1941), that this Court has been so zealous to protect, means, at the least, that States may not casually deprive a class of individuals of the vote because of some remote administrative benefit to the State. Oyama v. California (1948). By forbidding a soldier ever to controvert the presumption of nonresidence, the Texas Constitution imposes an invidious discrimination in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.”[T]here is no indication in the Constitution that … occupation affords a permissible basis for distinguishing between qualified voters within the State.” Gray v. Sanders (1963).
We recognize that special problems may be involved in determining whether servicemen have actually acquired a new domicile in a State for franchise purposes. We emphasize that Texas is free to take reasonable and adequate steps, as have other States, to see that all applicants for the vote actually fulfill the requirements of bona fide residence. But this constitutional provision goes beyond such rules.”[T]he presumption here created is … definitely conclusive—incapable of being overcome by proof of the most positive character.” Heiner v. Donnan (1932). All servicemen not residents of Texas before induction come within the provision’s sweep. Not one of them can ever vote in Texas, no matter how long Texas may have been his true home.”[T]he uniform of our country … [must not] be the badge of disfranchisement for the man or woman who wears it.”
Reversed.
Harper v. Virginia Bd. of Elections (1966)
383 U.S. 663 (1966)
Vote: 6-3
Decision: Reversed
Majority: Douglas, joined by Warren, Clark, Brennan, White, and Fortas
Dissent: Black
Dissent: Harlan, joined by Stewart
JUSTICE DOUGLAS DELIVERED THE OPINION OF THE COURT.
These are suits by Virginia residents to have declared unconstitutional Virginia’s poll tax. …
While the right to vote in federal elections is conferred by Art. I, §2, of the Constitution (United States v. Classic (1941)), the right to vote in state elections is nowhere expressly mentioned. It is argued that the right to vote in state elections is implicit, particularly by reason of the First Amendment and that it may not constitutionally be conditioned upon the payment of a tax or fee. We do not stop to canvass the relation between voting and political expression. For it is enough to say that once the franchise is granted to the electorate, lines may not be drawn which are inconsistent with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That is to say, the right of suffrage “is subject to the imposition of state standards which are not discriminatory and which do not contravene any restriction that Congress, acting pursuant to its constitutional powers, has imposed.” Lassiter v. Northampton Election Board (1959). We were speaking there of a state literacy test which we sustained, warning that the result would be different if a literacy test, fair on its face, were used to discriminate against a class. But the Lassiter case does not govern the result here, because, unlike a poll tax, the “ability to read and write … has some relation to standards designed to promote intelligent use of the ballot.”
We conclude that a State violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment whenever it makes the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee an electoral standard. Voter qualifications have no relation to wealth nor to paying or not paying this or any other tax. Our cases demonstrate that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment restrains the States from fixing voter qualifications which invidiously discriminate. Thus, without questioning the power of a State to impose reasonable residence restrictions on the availability of the ballot, we held in Carrington v. Rash (1965), that a State may not deny the opportunity to vote to a bona fide resident merely because he is a member of the armed services.”By forbidding a soldier ever to controvert the presumption of non-residence, the Texas Constitution imposes an invidious discrimination in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. … We think the same must be true of requirements of wealth or affluence or payment of a fee.
Long ago, in Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), the Court referred to “the political franchise of voting” as a “fundamental political right, because preservative of all rights.” Recently in Reynolds v. Sims (1964), we said, “Undoubtedly, the right of suffrage is a fundamental matter in a free and democratic society. Especially since the right to exercise the franchise in a free and unimpaired manner is preservative of other basic civil and political rights, any alleged infringement of the right of citizens to vote must be carefully and meticulously scrutinized.” There we were considering charges that voters in one part of the State had greater representation per person in the State Legislature than voters in another part of the State. We concluded:
“A citizen, a qualified voter, is no more nor no less so because he lives in the city or on the farm. This is the clear and strong command of our Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. This is an essential part of the concept of a government of laws and not men. This is at the heart of Lincoln’s vision of `government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people.’ The Equal Protection Clause demands no less than substantially equal state legislative representation for all citizens, of all places as well as of all races.”
We say the same whether the citizen, otherwise qualified to vote, has $1.50 in his pocket or nothing at all, pays the fee or fails to pay it. The principle that denies the State the right to dilute a citizen’s vote on account of his economic status or other such factors by analogy bars a system which excludes those unable to pay a fee to vote or who fail to pay.
It is argued that a State may exact fees from citizens for many different kinds of licenses; that if it can demand from all an equal fee for a driver’s license, it can demand from all an equal poll tax for voting. But we must remember that the interest of the State, when it comes to voting, is limited to the power to fix qualifications. Wealth, like race, creed, or color, is not germane to one’s ability to participate intelligently in the electoral process. Lines drawn on the basis of wealth or property, like those of race are traditionally disfavored. To introduce wealth or payment of a fee as a measure of a voter’s qualifications is to introduce a capricious or irrelevant factor. The degree of the discrimination is irrelevant. In this context – that is, as a condition of obtaining a ballot – the requirement of fee paying causes an “invidious” discrimination that runs afoul of the Equal Protection Clause. …
We agree, of course, with Mr. Justice Holmes that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment “does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics” Lochner v. New York (1905). Likewise, the Equal Protection Clause is not shackled to the political theory of a particular era. In determining what lines are unconstitutionally discriminatory, we have never been confined to historic notions of equality, any more than we have restricted due process to a fixed catalogue of what was at a given time deemed to be the limits of fundamental rights. Notions of what constitutes equal treatment for purposes of the Equal Protection Clause do change. This Court in 1896 held that laws providing for separate public facilities for white and Negro citizens did not deprive the latter of the equal protection and treatment that the Fourteenth Amendment commands. Plessy v. Ferguson. Seven of the eight Justices then sitting subscribed to the Court’s opinion, thus joining in expressions of what constituted unequal and discriminatory treatment that sound strange to a contemporary ear. When, in 1954 – more than a half-century later – we repudiated the “separate-but-equal” doctrine of Plessy as respects public education we stated: “In approaching this problem, we cannot turn the clock back to 1868 when the Amendment was adopted, or even to 1896 when Plessy v. Ferguson was written.” Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
In a recent searching re-examination of the Equal Protection Clause, we held, as already noted, that “the opportunity for equal participation by all voters in the election of state legislators” is required. Reynolds v. Sims (1964). We decline to qualify that principle by sustaining this poll tax. Our conclusion, like that in Reynolds v. Sims (1964), is founded not on what we think governmental policy should be, but on what the Equal Protection Clause requires.
We have long been mindful that where fundamental rights and liberties are asserted under the Equal Protection Clause, classifications which might invade or restrain them must be closely scrutinized and carefully confined.
Those principles apply here. For to repeat, wealth or fee paying has, in our view, no relation to voting qualifications; the right to vote is too precious, too fundamental to be so burdened or conditioned.
Reversed.
MR. JUSTICE HARLAN, whom MR. JUSTICE STEWART joins, dissenting.
The final demise of state poll taxes, already totally proscribed by the Twenty-Fourth Amendment with respect to federal elections and abolished by the States themselves in all but four States with respect to state elections, is perhaps in itself not of great moment. But the fact that the coup de grace has been administered by this Court instead of being left to the affected States or to the federal political process should be a matter of continuing concern to all interested in maintaining the proper role of this tribunal under our scheme of government.
…
… In substance the Court’s analysis of the equal protection issue goes no further than to say that the electoral franchise is “precious” and “fundamental,” and to conclude that “[t]o introduce wealth or payment of a fee as a measure of a voter’s qualifications is to introduce a capricious or irrelevant factor[.]” These are of course captivating phrases, but they are wholly inadequate to satisfy the standard governing adjudication of the equal protection issue: Is there a rational basis for Virginia’s poll tax as a voting qualification? I think the answer to that question is undoubtedly “yes.”
… it is certainly a rational argument that payment of some minimal poll tax promotes civic responsibility, weeding out those who do not care enough about public affairs to pay $1.50 or thereabouts a year for the exercise of the franchise. It is also arguable, indeed it was probably accepted as sound political theory by a large percentage of Americans through most of our history, that people with some property have a deeper stake in community affairs, and are consequently more responsible, more educated, more knowledgeable, more worthy of confidence, than those without means, and that the community and Nation would be better managed if the franchise were restricted to such citizens. Nondiscriminatory and fairly applied literacy tests, upheld by this Court in Lassiter v. Northampton Election Board (1959), find justification on very similar grounds.
These viewpoints, to be sure, ring hollow on most contemporary ears. Their lack of acceptance today is evidenced by the fact that nearly all of the States, left to their own devices, have eliminated property or poll-tax qualifications; by the cognate fact that Congress and three-quarters of the States quickly ratified the Twenty-Fourth Amendment; and by the fact that rules such as the “pauper exclusion” in Virginia law, have never been enforced.
Property and poll-tax qualifications, very simply, are not in accord with current egalitarian notions of how a modern democracy should be organized. It is of course entirely fitting that legislatures should modify the law to reflect such changes in popular attitudes. However, it is all wrong, in my view, for the Court to adopt the political doctrines popularly accepted at a particular moment of our history and to declare all others to be irrational and invidious, barring them from the range of choice by reasonably minded people acting through the political process. …
I would affirm the decision of the District Court.
Kramer v. Union Free Sch. Dist. No. 15 (1969)
395 U.S. 621 (1969)
Vote: 5-3
Decision: Reversed
Majority: Warren, joined by Douglas, Brennan, White, and Marshall
Dissent: Stewart, joined by Black, and Harlan
MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WARREN delivered the opinion of the Court.
In this case we are called on to determine whether § 2012 of the New York Education Law is constitutional. The legislation provides that in certain New York school districts residents who are otherwise eligible to vote in state and federal elections may vote in the school district election only if they (1) own (or lease) taxable real property within the district, or (2) are parents (or have custody of) children enrolled in the local public schools. Appellant, a bachelor who neither owns nor leases taxable real property, filed suit in federal court claiming that § 2012 denied him equal protection of the laws in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. With one judge dissenting, a three-judge District Court dismissed appellant’s complaint. Finding that § 2012 does violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, we reverse.
New York law provides basically three methods of school board selection. In some large city districts, the school board is appointed by the mayor or city council. On the other hand, in some cities, primarily those with less than 125,000 residents, the school board is elected at general or municipal elections in which all qualified city voters may participate. Finally, in other districts such as the one involved in this case, which are primarily rural and suburban, the school board is elected at an annual meeting of qualified school district voters.
The challenged statute is applicable only in the districts which hold annual meetings. To be eligible to vote at an annual district meeting, an otherwise qualified district resident must either (1) be the owner or lessee of taxable real property located in the district, (2) be the spouse of one who owns or leases qualifying property, or (3) be the parent or guardian of a child enrolled for a specified time during the preceding year in a local district school.
… Appellant is a 31-year-old college-educated stock-broker who lives in his parents’ home in the Union Free School District No. 15, a district to which § 2012 applies. He is a citizen of the United States and has voted in federal and state elections since 1959. However, since he has no children and neither owns nor leases taxable real property, appellant’s attempts to register for and vote in the local school district elections have been unsuccessful. After the school district rejected his 1965 application, appellant instituted the present class action challenging the constitutionality of the voter eligibility requirements. …
… The sole issue in this case is whether the additional requirements of § 2012—requirements which prohibit some district residents who are otherwise qualified by age and citizenship from participating in district meetings and school board elections—violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s command that no State shall deny persons equal protection of the laws.
“In determining whether or not a state law violates the Equal Protection Clause, we must consider the facts and circumstances behind the law, the interests which the State claims to be protecting, and the interests of those who are disadvantaged by the classification.” Williams v. Rhodes (1968). And, in this case, we must give the statute a close and exacting examination.”[S]ince the right to exercise the franchise in a free and unimpaired manner is preservative of other basic civil and political rights, any alleged infringement of the right of citizens to vote must be carefully and meticulously scrutinized.” Reynolds v. Sims (1964). This careful examination is necessary because statutes distributing the franchise constitute the foundation of our representative society. Any unjustified discrimination in determining who may participate in political affairs or in the selection of public officials undermines the legitimacy of representative government.
… Statutes granting the franchise to residents on a selective basis always pose the danger of denying some citizens any effective voice in the governmental affairs which substantially affect their lives. Therefore, if a challenged state statute grants the right to vote to some bona fide residents of requisite age and citizenship and denies the franchise to others, the Court must determine whether the exclusions are necessary to promote a compelling state interest.
And, for these reasons, the deference usually given to the judgment of legislators does not extend to decisions concerning which resident citizens may participate in the election of legislators and other public officials. Those decisions must be carefully scrutinized by the Court to determine whether each resident citizen has, as far as is possible, an equal voice in the selections. Accordingly, when we are reviewing statutes which deny some residents the right to vote, the general presumption of constitutionality afforded state statutes and the traditional approval given state classifications if the Court can conceive of a “rational basis” for the distinctions made are not applicable. The presumption of constitutionality and the approval given “rational” classifications in other types of enactments are based on an assumption that the institutions of state government are structured so as to represent fairly all the people. However, when the challenge to the statute is in effect a challenge of this basic assumption, the assumption can no longer serve as the basis for presuming constitutionality. And, the assumption is no less under attack because the legislature which decides who may participate at the various levels of political choice is fairly elected. Legislation which delegates decision making to bodies elected by only a portion of those eligible to vote for the legislature can cause unfair representation. Such legislation can exclude a minority of voters from any voice in the decisions just as effectively as if the decisions were made by legislators the minority had no voice in selecting.
… We turn therefore to question whether the exclusion is necessary to promote a compelling state interest. First, appellees argue that the State has a legitimate interest in limiting the franchise in school district elections to “members of the community of interest”—those “primarily interested in such elections.” Second, appellees urge that the State may reasonably and permissibly conclude that “property taxpayers” (including lessees of taxable property who share the tax burden through rent payments) and parents of the children enrolled in the district’s schools are those “primarily interested” in school affairs.
We do not understand appellees to argue that the State is attempting to limit the franchise to those “subjectively concerned” about school matters. Rather, they appear to argue that the State’s legitimate interest is in restricting a voice in school matters to those “directly affected” by such decisions. The State apparently reasons that since the schools are financed in part by local property taxes, persons whose out-of-pocket expenses are “directly” affected by property tax changes should be allowed to vote. Similarly, parents of children in school are thought to have a “direct” stake in school affairs and are given a vote.
Appellees argue that it is necessary to limit the franchise to those “primarily interested” in school affairs because “the ever increasing complexity of the many interacting phases of the school system and structure make it extremely difficult for the electorate fully to understand the whys and wherefores of the detailed operations of the school system.” Appellees say that many communications of school boards and school administrations are sent home to the parents through the district pupils and are “not broadcast to the general public”; thus, nonparents will be less informed than parents. Further, appellees argue, those who are assessed for local property taxes (either directly or indirectly through rent) will have enough of an interest “through the burden on their pocketbooks, to acquire such information as they may need.”
We need express no opinion as to whether the State in some circumstances might limit the exercise of the franchise to those “primarily interested” or “primarily affected.” Of course, we therefore do not reach the issue of whether these particular elections are of the type in which the franchise may be so limited. For, assuming, arguendo, that New York legitimately might limit the franchise in these school district elections to those “primarily interested in school affairs,” close scrutiny of the § 2012 classifications demonstrates that they do not accomplish this purpose with sufficient precision to justify denying appellant the franchise.
Whether classifications allegedly limiting the franchise to those resident citizens “primarily interested” deny those excluded equal protection of the laws depends, inter alia, on whether all those excluded are in fact substantially less interested or affected than those the statute includes. In other words, the classifications must be tailored so that the exclusion of appellant and members of his class is necessary to achieve the articulated state goal. Section 2012 does not meet the exacting standard of precision we require of statutes which selectively distribute the franchise. The classifications in § 2012 permit inclusion of many persons who have, at best, a remote and indirect interest in school affairs and, on the other hand, exclude others who have a distinct and direct interest in the school meeting decisions.
Nor do appellees offer any justification for the exclusion of seemingly interested and informed residents—other than to argue that the § 2012 classifications include those “whom the State could understandably deem to be the most intimately interested in actions taken by the school board,” and urge that “the task of … balancing the interest of the community in the maintenance of orderly school district elections against the interest of any individual in voting in such elections should clearly remain with the Legislature.” But the issue is not whether the legislative judgments are rational. A more exacting standard obtains. The issue is whether the § 2012 requirements do in fact sufficiently further a compelling state interest to justify denying the franchise to appellant and members of his class. The requirements of § 2012 are not sufficiently tailored to limiting the franchise to those “primarily interested” in school affairs to justify the denial of the franchise to appellant and members of his class.
The judgment of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York is therefore reversed. The case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
Richardson v. Ramirez (1974)
418 U.S. 24 (1974)
Vote: 7-3
Decision: Reversed
Majority: Rehnquist, joined by Burger, Stewart, White, Blackmun, Powell
Dissent: Marshall, joined by Brennan, and Douglas (Part I-A)
MR. JUSTICE REHNQUIST DELIVERED THE OPINION OF THE COURT.
The three individual respondents in this case were convicted of felonies and have completed the service of their respective sentences and paroles. They filed a petition for a writ of mandate in the Supreme Court of California to compel California county election officials to register them as voters. They claimed, on behalf of themselves and others similarly situated, that application to them of the provisions of the California Constitution and implementing statutes which disenfranchised persons convicted of an “infamous crime” denied them the right to equal protection of the laws under the Federal Constitution. The Supreme Court of California held that “as applied to all ex-felons whose terms of incarceration and parole have expired, the provisions of article II and article XX, section 11, of the California Constitution denying the right of suffrage to persons convicted of crime, together with the several sections of the Elections Code implementing that disqualification … violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” We granted certiorari.
Each of the individual respondents was convicted of one or more felonies, and served some time in jail or prison followed by a successfully terminated parole. Respondent Ramirez was convicted in Texas; respondents Lee and Gill were convicted in California. When Ramirez applied to register to vote in San Luis Obispo County, the County Clerk refused to allow him to register. The Monterey County Clerk refused registration to respondent Lee, and the Stanislaus County Registrar of Voters (hereafter also included in references to clerks) refused registration to respondent Gill. All three respondents were refused registration because of their felony convictions.
In May 1972 respondents filed a petition for a writ of mandate in the Supreme Court of California. … [I]t was contended that California’s denial of the franchise to the class of ex-felons could no longer withstand scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Relying on the Court’s recent voting-rights cases, respondents argued that a compelling state interest must be found to justify exclusion of a class from the franchise, and that California could assert no such interest with respect to ex-felons. …
Unlike most claims under the Equal Protection Clause, for the decision of which we have only the language of the Clause itself as it is embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment, respondents’ claim implicates not merely the language of the Equal Protection Clause of §1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, but also the provisions of the less familiar §2 of the Amendment:
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. (Emphasis supplied.)
Petitioner contends that the italicized language of §2 expressly exempts from the sanction of that section disenfranchisement grounded on prior conviction of a felony. She goes on to argue that those who framed and adopted the Fourteenth Amendment could not have intended to prohibit outright in §1 of that Amendment that which was expressly exempted from the lesser sanction of reduced representation imposed by §2 of the Amendment. This argument seems to us a persuasive one unless it can be shown that the language of §2, “except for participation in rebellion, or other crime,” was intended to have a different meaning than would appear from its face.
The problem of interpreting the “intention” of a constitutional provision is, as countless cases of this Court recognize, a difficult one. Not only are there deliberations of congressional committees and floor debates in the House and Senate, but an amendment must thereafter be ratified by the necessary number of States. The legislative history bearing on the meaning of the relevant language of §2 is scant indeed; the framers of the Amendment were primarily concerned with the effect of reduced representation upon the States, rather than with the two forms of disenfranchisement which were exempted from that consequence by the language with which we are concerned here. Nonetheless, what legislative history there is indicates that this language was intended by Congress to mean what it says. …
Further light is shed on the understanding of those who framed and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, and thus on the meaning of §2, by the fact that at the time of the adoption of the Amendment, 29 States had provisions in their constitutions which prohibited, or authorized the legislature to prohibit, exercise of the franchise by persons convicted of felonies or infamous crimes.
More impressive than the mere existence of the state constitutional provisions disenfranchising felons at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment is the congressional treatment of States readmitted to the Union following the Civil War. For every State thus readmitted, affirmative congressional action in the form of an enabling act was taken, and as a part of the readmission process the State seeking readmission was required to submit for the approval of the Congress its proposed state constitution. In March 1867, before any State was readmitted, Congress passed “An act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States,” the so-called Reconstruction Act. Section 5 of the Reconstruction Act established conditions on which the former Confederate States would be readmitted to representation in Congress. It provided:
“That when the people of any one of said rebel States shall have formed a constitution of government in conformity with the Constitution of the United States in all respects, framed by a convention of delegates elected by the male citizens of said State, twenty-one years old and upward, of whatever race, color, or previous condition, who have been resident in said State for one year previous to the day of such election, except such as may be disfranchised for participation in the rebellion or for felony at common law, and when such constitution shall provide that the elective franchise shall be enjoyed by all such persons as have the qualifications herein stated for electors of delegates, and when such constitution shall be ratified by a majority of the persons voting on the question of ratification who are qualified as electors for delegates, and when such constitution shall have been submitted to Congress … said State shall be declared entitled to representation in Congress, and senators and representatives shall be admitted therefrom on their taking the oath prescribed by law …” (Emphasis supplied.) …
This convincing evidence of the historical understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment is confirmed by the decisions of this Court which have discussed the constitutionality of provisions disenfranchising felons. Although the Court has never given plenary consideration to the precise question of whether a State may constitutionally exclude some or all convicted felons from the franchise, we have indicated approval of such exclusions on a number of occasions. In two cases decided toward the end of the last century, the Court approved exclusions of bigamists and polygamists from the franchise under territorial laws of Utah and Idaho. Murphy v. Ramsey (1885); Davis v. Beason (1890). Much more recently we have strongly suggested in dicta that exclusion of convicted felons from the franchise violates no constitutional provision. In Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections (1959), where we upheld North Carolina’s imposition of a literacy requirement for voting, the Court said:
“Residence requirements, age, previous criminal record (Davis v. Beason) are obvious examples indicating factors which a State may take into consideration in determining the qualifications of voters.”
… Despite this settled historical and judicial understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment’s effect on state laws disenfranchising convicted felons, respondents argue that our recent decisions invalidating other state-imposed restrictions on the franchise as violative of the Equal Protection Clause require us to invalidate the disenfranchisement of felons as well. They rely on such cases to support the conclusions of the Supreme Court of California that a State must show a “compelling state interest” to justify exclusion of ex-felons from the franchise and that California has not done so here.
As we have seen, however, the exclusion of felons from the vote has an affirmative sanction in §2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, a sanction which was not present in the case of the other restrictions on the franchise which were invalidated in the cases on which respondents rely. We hold that the understanding of those who adopted the Fourteenth Amendment, as reflected in the express language of §2 and in the historical and judicial interpretation of the Amendment’s applicability to state laws disenfranchising felons, is of controlling significance in distinguishing such laws from those other state limitations on the franchise which have been held invalid under the Equal Protection Clause by this Court. … §1 in dealing with voting rights as it does, could not have been meant to bar outright a form of disenfranchisement which was expressly exempted from the less drastic sanction of reduced representation which §2 imposed for other forms of disenfranchisement. …
Pressed upon us by the respondents, and by amici curiae, are contentions that these notions are outmoded, and that the more modern view is that it is essential to the process of rehabilitating the ex-felon that he be returned to his role in society as a fully participating citizen when he has completed the serving of his term. We would by no means discount these arguments if addressed to the legislative forum which may properly weigh and balance them against those advanced in support of California’s present constitutional provisions. But it is not for us to choose one set of values over the other. If respondents are correct, and the view which they advocate is indeed the more enlightened and sensible one, presumably the people of the State of California will ultimately come around to that view. And if they do not do so, their failure is some evidence, at least, of the fact that there are two sides to the argument.
We therefore hold that the Supreme Court of California erred in concluding that California may no longer, consistent with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, exclude from the franchise convicted felons who have completed their sentences and paroles. The California court did not reach respondents’ alternative contention that there was such a total lack of uniformity in county election officials’ enforcement of the challenged state laws as to work a separate denial of equal protection, and we believe that it should have an opportunity to consider the claim before we address ourselves to it. Accordingly, we reverse and remand for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
MR. JUSTICE MARSHALL, WITH WHOM MR. JUSTICE BRENNAN JOINS, DISSENTING.
The Court today holds that a State may strip ex-felons who have fully paid their debt to society of their fundamental right to vote without running afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment. This result is, in my view, based on an unsound historical analysis which already has been rejected by this Court. In straining to reach that result, I believe that the Court has also disregarded important limitations on its jurisdiction. For these reasons, I respectfully dissent.
… The Court construes §2 of the Fourteenth Amendment as an express authorization for the States to disenfranchise former felons. Section 2 does except disenfranchisement for “participation in rebellion, or other crime” from the operation of its penalty provision. As the Court notes, however, there is little independent legislative history as to the crucial words “or other crime”; the proposed §2 went to a joint committee containing only the phrase “participation in rebellion” and emerged with “or other crime” inexplicably tacked on. In its exhaustive review of the lengthy legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court has come upon only one explanatory reference for the “other crimes” provision – a reference which is unilluminating at best.
The historical purpose for §2 itself is, however, relatively clear and in my view, dispositive of this case. The Republicans who controlled the 39th Congress were concerned that the additional congressional representation of the Southern States which would result from the abolition of slavery might weaken their own political dominance. There were two alternatives available – either to limit southern representation, which was unacceptable on a long-term basis, or to insure that southern Negroes, sympathetic to the Republican cause, would be enfranchised; but an explicit grant of suffrage to Negroes was thought politically unpalatable at the time. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment was the resultant compromise. It put Southern States to a choice – enfranchise Negro voters or lose congressional representation. …
It is clear that §2 was not intended and should not be construed to be a limitation on the other sections of the Fourteenth Amendment. Section 2 provides a special remedy – reduced representation – to cure a particular form of electoral abuse – the disenfranchisement of Negroes. There is no indication that the framers of the provisions intended that special penalty to be the exclusive remedy for all forms of electoral discrimination. This Court has repeatedly rejected that rationale.
Rather, a discrimination to which the penalty provision of §2 is inapplicable must still be judged against the Equal Protection Clause of §1 to determine whether judicial or congressional remedies should be invoked. …
The Court’s references to congressional enactments contemporaneous to the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, such as the Reconstruction Act and the readmission statutes, are inapposite. They do not explain the purpose for the adoption of §2 of the Fourteenth Amendment. They merely indicate that disenfranchisement for participation in crime was not uncommon in the States at the time of the adoption of the Amendment. Hence, not surprisingly, that form of disenfranchisement was excepted from the application of the special penalty provision of §2. But because Congress chose to exempt one form of electoral discrimination from the reduction-of-representation remedy provided by §2 does not necessarily imply congressional approval of this disenfranchisement. By providing a special remedy for disenfranchisement of a particular class of voters in §2, Congress did not approve all election discriminations to which the §2 remedy was inapplicable, and such discriminations thus are not forever immunized from evolving standards of equal protection scrutiny. …
Disenfranchisement for participation in crime … was common at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. But “constitutional concepts of equal protection are not immutably frozen like insects trapped in Devonian amber.” We have repeatedly observed:
[T]he Equal Protection Clause is not shackled to the political theory of a particular era. In determining what lines are unconstitutionally discriminatory, we have never been confined to historic notions of equality, any more than we have restricted due process to a fixed catalogue of what was at a given time deemed to be the limits of fundamental rights. Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966).
Accordingly, neither the fact that several States had ex-felon disenfranchisement laws at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, nor that such disenfranchisement was specifically excepted from the special remedy of §2, can serve to insulate such disenfranchisement from equal protection scrutiny.
In my view, the disenfranchisement of ex-felons must be measured against the requirements of the Equal Protection Clause of §1 of the Fourteenth Amendment. That analysis properly begins with the observation that because the right to vote “is of the essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government,” Reynolds v. Sims, voting is a “fundamental” right. …”[I]f a challenged statute grants the right to vote to some citizens and denies the franchise to others, ‘the Court must determine whether the exclusions are necessary to promote a compelling state interest.’” …
I think it clear that the State has not met its burden of justifying the blanket disenfranchisement of former felons presented by this case. There is certainly no basis for asserting that ex-felons have any less interest in the democratic process than any other citizen. Like everyone else, their daily lives are deeply affected and changed by the decisions of government. As the Secretary of State of California observed in his memorandum to the Court in support of respondents in this case:
“It is doubtful … whether the state can demonstrate either a compelling or rational policy interest in denying former felons the right to vote. The individuals involved in the present case are persons who have fully paid their debt to society. They are as much affected by the actions of government as any other citizens, and have as much of a right to participate in governmental decision-making. Furthermore, the denial of the right to vote to such persons is a hindrance to the efforts of society to rehabilitate former felons and convert them into law-abiding and productive citizens.”
It is argued that disenfranchisement is necessary to prevent vote frauds. Although the State has a legitimate and, in fact, compelling interest in preventing election fraud, the challenged provision is not sustainable on that ground. First, the disenfranchisement provisions are patently both overinclusive and underinclusive. The provision is not limited to those who have demonstrated a marked propensity for abusing the ballot by violating election laws. Rather, it encompasses all former felons and there has been no showing that ex-felons generally are any more likely to abuse the ballot than the remainder of the population. In contrast, many of those convicted of violating election laws are treated as misdemeanants and are not barred from voting at all. It seems clear that the classification here is not tailored to achieve its articulated goal, since it crudely excludes large numbers of otherwise qualified voters.
Moreover, there are means available for the State to prevent voting fraud which are far less burdensome on the constitutionally protected right to vote. …
Another asserted purpose is to keep former felons from voting because their likely voting pattern might be subversive of the interests of an orderly society …
To the extent [previous cases] approve the doctrine that citizens can be barred from the ballot box because they would vote to change the existing criminal law, those decisions are surely of minimal continuing precedential value. We have since explicitly held that such “differences of opinion cannot justify excluding [any] group from … ‘the franchise’:
“[I]f they are … residents, … they, as all other qualified residents, have a right to an equal opportunity for political representation. … `Fencing out’ from the franchise a sector of the population because of the way they may vote is constitutionally impermissible.”
Although, in the last century, this Court may have justified the exclusion of voters from the electoral process for fear that they would vote to change laws considered important by a temporal majority, I have little doubt that we would not countenance such a purpose today. The process of democracy is one of change. Our laws are not frozen into immutable form, they are constantly in the process of revision in response to the needs of a changing society. The public interest, as conceived by a majority of the voting public, is constantly undergoing reexamination. This Court’s holding in [previous cases] that a State may disenfranchise a class of voters to “withdraw all political influence from those who are practically hostile” to the existing order, strikes at the very heart of the democratic process. A temporal majority could use such a power to preserve inviolate its view of the social order simply by disenfranchising those with different views. Voters who opposed the repeal of prohibition could have disenfranchised those who advocated repeal “to prevent persons from being enabled by their votes to defeat the criminal laws of the country.” Today, presumably those who support the legalization of marihuana could be barred from the ballot box for much the same reason. The ballot is the democratic system’s coin of the realm. To condition its exercise on support of the established order is to debase that currency beyond recognition. Rather than resurrect [those precedents], I would expressly disavow any continued adherence to the dangerous notions therein expressed. …
The disenfranchisement of ex-felons had “its origin in the fogs and fictions of feudal jurisprudence and doubtless has been brought forward into modern statutes without fully realizing either the effect of its literal significance or the extent of its infringement upon the spirit of our system of government.” Byers v. Sun Savings Bank (Oklahoma 1914).
I think it clear that measured against the standards of this Court’s modern equal protection jurisprudence, the blanket disenfranchisement of ex-felons cannot stand.
I respectfully dissent.
Hunter v. Underwood (1985)
471 U.S. 222 (1985)
Vote: 8-0
Decision: Affirmed
Majority: Rehnquist, joined by Burger, Brennan, White, Marshall, Blackmun, Stevens, O’Connor
Not participating: Powell
JUSTICE REHNQUIST delivered the opinion of the Court.
We are required in this case to decide the constitutionality of Art. VIII, § 182, of the Alabama Constitution of 1901, which provides for the disenfranchisement of persons convicted of, among other offenses, “any crime … involving moral turpitude.” Appellees Carmen Edwards, a black, and Victor Underwood, a white, have been blocked from the voter rolls pursuant to § 182 by the Boards of Registrars for Montgomery and Jefferson Counties, respectively, because they each have been convicted of presenting a worthless check. …
The predecessor to § 182 was Art. VIII, § 3, of the Alabama Constitution of 1875, which denied persons “convicted of treason, embezzlement of public funds, malfeasance in office, larceny, bribery, or other crime punishable by imprisonment in the penitentiary” the right to register, vote or hold public office. These offenses were largely, if not entirely, felonies. The drafters of § 182, which was adopted by the 1901 convention, expanded the list of enumerated crimes substantially to include the following:
“treason, murder, arson, embezzlement, malfeasance in office, larceny, receiving stolen property, obtaining property or money under false pretenses, perjury, subornation of perjury, robbery, assault with intent to rob, burglary, forgery, bribery, assault and battery on the wife, bigamy, living in adultery, sodomy, incest, rape, miscegenation, [and] crime against nature.”
The drafters retained the general felony provision — “any crime punishable by imprisonment in the penitentiary” — but also added a new catchall provision covering “any … crime involving moral turpitude.” This latter phrase is not defined, but it was subsequently interpreted by the Alabama Supreme Court to mean an act that is ” `immoral in itself, regardless of the fact whether it is punishable by law. …
… Various minor nonfelony offenses such as presenting a worthless check and petty larceny fall within the sweep of § 182, while more serious nonfelony offenses such as second-degree manslaughter, assault on a police officer, mailing pornography, and aiding the escape of a misdemeanant do not because they are neither enumerated in § 182 nor considered crimes involving moral turpitude. It is alleged, and the Court of Appeals found, that the crimes selected for inclusion in § 182 were believed by the delegates to be more frequently committed by blacks.
Section 182 on its face is racially neutral, applying equally to anyone convicted of one of the enumerated crimes or a crime falling within one of the catchall provisions. Appellee Edwards nonetheless claims that the provision has had a racially discriminatory impact. The District Court made no finding on this claim, but the Court of Appeals implicitly found the evidence of discriminatory impact indisputable:
“The registrars’ expert estimated that by January 1903 section 182 had disfranchised approximately ten times as many blacks as whites. This disparate effect persists today. In Jefferson and Montgomery Counties blacks are by even the most modest estimates at least 1.7 times as likely as whites to suffer disfranchisement under section 182 for the commission of nonprison offenses.”
… Presented with a neutral state law that produces disproportionate effects along racial lines, the Court of Appeals was correct in applying the approach of Arlington Heights to determine whether the law violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment:
“[O]fficial action will not be held unconstitutional solely because it results in a racially disproportionate impact. … Proof of racially discriminatory intent or purpose is required to show a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.” Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. (1977). See Washington v. Davis (1976).
Once racial discrimination is shown to have been a “substantial” or “motivating” factor behind enactment of the law, the burden shifts to the law’s defenders to demonstrate that the law would have been enacted without this factor.
… Although understandably no “eyewitnesses” to the 1901 proceedings testified, testimony and opinions of historians were offered and received without objection. These showed that the Alabama Constitutional Convention of 1901 was part of a movement that swept the post-Reconstruction South to disenfranchise blacks. The delegates to the all-white convention were not secretive about their purpose. John B. Knox, president of the convention, stated in his opening address:
“And what is it that we want to do? Why it is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this State.”
Indeed, neither the District Court nor appellants seriously dispute the claim that this zeal for white supremacy ran rampant at the convention.
… The evidence of legislative intent available to the courts below consisted of the proceedings of the convention, several historical studies, and the testimony of two expert historians. Having reviewed this evidence, we are persuaded that the Court of Appeals was correct in its assessment. That court’s opinion presents a thorough analysis of the evidence and demonstrates conclusively that § 182 was enacted with the intent of disenfranchising blacks. We see little purpose in repeating that factual analysis here. At oral argument in this Court appellants’ counsel essentially conceded this point, stating: “I would be very blind and naive [to] try to come up and stand before this Court and say that race was not a factor in the enactment of Section 182; that race did not play a part in the decisions of those people who were at the constitutional convention of 1901 and I won’t do that.”
In their brief to this Court, appellants maintain on the basis of their expert’s testimony that the real purpose behind § 182 was to disenfranchise poor whites as well as blacks. The Southern Democrats, in their view, sought in this way to stem the resurgence of Populism which threatened their power …
Even were we to accept this explanation as correct, it hardly saves § 182 from invalidity. The explanation concedes both that discrimination against blacks, as well as against poor whites, was a motivating factor for the provision and that § 182 certainly would not have been adopted by the convention or ratified by the electorate in the absence of the racially discriminatory motivation. …
Appellants contend that the State has a legitimate interest in denying the franchise to those convicted of crimes involving moral turpitude, and that § 182 should be sustained on that ground. The Court of Appeals convincingly demonstrated that such a purpose simply was not a motivating factor of the 1901 convention. …
At oral argument in this Court, appellants’ counsel suggested that, regardless of the original purpose of § 182, events occurring in the succeeding 80 years had legitimated the provision. Some of the more blatantly discriminatory selections, such as assault and battery on the wife and miscegenation, have been struck down by the courts, and appellants contend that the remaining crimes — felonies and moral turpitude misdemeanors — are acceptable bases for denying the franchise. Without deciding whether § 182 would be valid if enacted today without any impermissible motivation, we simply observe that its original enactment was motivated by a desire to discriminate against blacks on account of race and the section continues to this day to have that effect. As such, it violates equal protection under [precedent].
… The single remaining question is whether § 182 is excepted from the operation of the Equal Protection Clause of § 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment by the “other crime” provision of § 2 of that Amendment. Without again considering the implicit authorization of § 2 to deny the vote to citizens “for participation in rebellion, or other crime,” see Richardson v. Ramirez (1974), we are confident that § 2 was not designed to permit the purposeful racial discrimination attending the enactment and operation of § 182 which otherwise violates § 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nothing in our opinion in Richardson v. Ramirez, supra, suggests the contrary.
The judgment of the Court of Appeals is
Affirmed.
Rice v. Cayetano (2000)
528 U.S. 495 (2000)
Vote: 5-4
Decision: Reversed
Majority: Kennedy, joined by Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito
Concurrence: Breyer, joined by Souter
Dissent: Stevens, joined by Ginsburg (Part II)
Dissent: Ginsburg
Justice Kennedy, delivered the opinion of the Court.
A citizen of Hawaii comes before us claiming that an explicit, race-based voting qualification has barred him from voting in a statewide election. The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States … controls the case. …
Not long after the creation of the new Territory, Congress became concerned with the condition of the native Hawaiian people. Reciting its purpose to rehabilitate the native Hawaiian population, Congress enacted the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, which set aside about 200,000 acres of the ceded public lands and created a program of loans and long-term leases for the benefit of native Hawaiians. …
Hawaii was admitted as the 50th State of the Union in 1959. With admission, the new State agreed to adopt the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act as part of its own Constitution. …
In the first decades following admission, the State apparently continued to administer the lands that had been set aside under the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act for the benefit of native Hawaiians. …
In 1978 Hawaii amended its Constitution to establish the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, which has as its mission “[t]he betterment of conditions of native Hawaiians … [and] Hawaiians[.]” Members of the 1978 constitutional convention, at which the new amendments were drafted and proposed, set forth the purpose of the proposed agency:
“Members [of the Committee of the Whole] were impressed by the concept of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs which establishes a public trust entity for the benefit of the people of Hawaiian ancestry. Members foresaw that it will provide Hawaiians the right to determine the priorities which will effectuate the betterment of their condition and welfare. …”
OHA is overseen by a nine-member board of trustees, the members of which … shall be “elected by qualified voters who are Hawaiians, as provided by law.” The term “Hawaiian” is defined by statute:
“`Hawaiian’ means any descendant of the aboriginal peoples inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands which exercised sovereignty and subsisted in the Hawaiian Islands in 1778, and which peoples thereafter have continued to reside in Hawaii.”
The statute defines “native Hawaiian” as follows:
“`Native Hawaiian’ means any descendant of not less than one-half part of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778, as defined by the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, 1920, as amended; provided that the term identically refers to the descendants of such blood quantum of such aboriginal peoples which exercised sovereignty and subsisted in the Hawaiian Islands in 1778 and which peoples thereafter continued to reside in Hawaii.”
Petitioner Harold Rice is a citizen of Hawaii and a descendant of preannexation residents of the islands. He is not, as we have noted, a descendant of pre-1778 natives, and so he is neither “native Hawaiian” nor “Hawaiian” as defined by the statute. Rice applied in March 1996 to vote in the elections for OHA trustees. To register to vote for the office of trustee he was required to attest: “I am also Hawaiian and desire to register to vote in OHA elections.” Rice marked through the words “am also Hawaiian and,” then checked the form “yes.” The State denied his application.
Rice sued Benjamin Cayetano, the Governor of Hawaii, in the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii. …
… Finding that the electoral scheme was “rationally related to the State’s responsibility under the Admission Act to utilize a portion of the proceeds from the § 5(b) lands for the betterment of Native Hawaiians,” the District Court held that the voting restriction did not violate the Constitution’s ban on racial classifications.
The Court of Appeals affirmed … [T]he court held that Hawaii “may rationally conclude that Hawaiians, being the group to whom trust obligations run and to whom OHA trustees owe a duty of loyalty, should be the group to decide who the trustees ought to be.” The court so held notwithstanding its clear holding that the Hawaii Constitution and implementing statutes “contain a racial classification on their face.”
We granted certiorari, and now reverse.
The purpose and command of the Fifteenth Amendment are set forth in language both explicit and comprehensive. The National Government and the States may not violate a fundamental principle: They may not deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race. …
The design of the Amendment is to reaffirm the equality of races at the most basic level of the democratic process, the exercise of the voting franchise. A resolve so absolute required language as simple in command as it was comprehensive in reach. Fundamental in purpose and effect … the Amendment prohibits all provisions denying or abridging the voting franchise of any citizen or class of citizens on the basis of race. …
Unlike [previous] cases, the voting structure now before us is neither subtle nor indirect. It is specific in granting the vote to persons of defined ancestry and to no others. The State maintains this is not a racial category at all but instead a classification limited to those whose ancestors were in Hawaii at a particular time, regardless of their race. … We reject this line of argument.
Ancestry can be a proxy for race. It is that proxy here. … The very object of the statutory definition in question and of its earlier congressional counterpart in the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act is to treat the early Hawaiians as a distinct people, commanding their own recognition and respect. The State, in enacting the legislation before us, has used ancestry as a racial definition and for a racial purpose.
… The ancestral inquiry mandated by the State implicates the same grave concerns as a classification specifying a particular race by name. One of the principal reasons race is treated as a forbidden classification is that it demeans the dignity and worth of a person to be judged by ancestry instead of by his or her own merit and essential qualities. An inquiry into ancestral lines is not consistent with respect based on the unique personality each of us possesses, a respect the Constitution itself secures in its concern for persons and citizens.
The ancestral inquiry mandated by the State is forbidden by the Fifteenth Amendment for the further reason that the use of racial classifications is corruptive of the whole legal order democratic elections seek to preserve. … Ancestral tracing of this sort achieves its purpose by creating a legal category which employs the same mechanisms, and causes the same injuries, as laws or statutes that use race by name. The State’s electoral restriction enacts a race-based voting qualification.
The State offers three principal defenses of its voting law, any of which, it contends, allows it to prevail even if the classification is a racial one under the Fifteenth Amendment. We examine, and reject, each of these arguments.
The most far reaching of the State’s arguments is that exclusion of non-Hawaiians from voting is permitted under our cases allowing the differential treatment of certain members of Indian tribes. … In reliance on that theory the Court has sustained a federal provision giving employment preferences to persons of tribal ancestry. The Mancari case, and the theory upon which it rests, are invoked by the State to defend its decision to restrict voting for the OHA trustees, who are charged so directly with protecting the interests of native Hawaiians.
… Even were we to take the substantial step of finding authority in Congress, delegated to the State, to treat Hawaiians or native Hawaiians as tribes, Congress may not authorize a State to create a voting scheme of this sort.
… To extend Mancari to this context would be to permit a State, by racial classification, to fence out whole classes of its citizens from decisionmaking in critical state affairs. The Fifteenth Amendment forbids this result.
Hawaii further contends that the limited voting franchise is sustainable under a series of cases holding that the rule of one person, one vote does not pertain to certain special purpose districts such as water or irrigation districts. …
We would not find those cases dispositive in any event, however. … Our special purpose district cases have not suggested that compliance with the one-person, one-vote rule of the Fourteenth Amendment somehow excuses compliance with the Fifteenth Amendment. We reject that argument here. …
Hawaii’s final argument is that the voting restriction does no more than ensure an alignment of interests between the fiduciaries and the beneficiaries of a trust. Thus, the contention goes, the restriction is based on beneficiary status rather than race.
As an initial matter, the contention founders on its own terms, for it is not clear that the voting classification is symmetric with the beneficiaries of the programs OHA administers. Although the bulk of the funds for which OHA is responsible appears to be earmarked for the benefit of “native Hawaiians,” the State permits both “native Hawaiians” and “Hawaiians” to vote for the office of trustee. The classification thus appears to create, not eliminate, a differential alignment between the identity of OHA trustees and what the State calls beneficiaries.
Hawaii’s argument fails on more essential grounds. The State’s position rests, in the end, on the demeaning premise that citizens of a particular race are somehow more qualified than others to vote on certain matters. That reasoning attacks the central meaning of the Fifteenth Amendment. … Race cannot qualify some and disqualify others from full participation in our democracy. All citizens, regardless of race, have an interest in selecting officials who make policies on their behalf, even if those policies will affect some groups more than others. … Hawaii may not assume, based on race, that petitioner or any other of its citizens will not cast a principled vote. To accept the position advanced by the State would give rise to the same indignities, and the same resulting tensions and animosities, the Amendment was designed to eliminate. …
…
When the culture and way of life of a people are all but engulfed by a history beyond their control, their sense of loss may extend down through generations; and their dismay may be shared by many members of the larger community. As the State of Hawaii attempts to address these realities, it must, as always, seek the political consensus that begins with a sense of shared purpose. One of the necessary beginning points is this principle: The Constitution of the United States, too, has become the heritage of all the citizens of Hawaii.
In this case the Fifteenth Amendment invalidates the electoral qualification based on ancestry. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is reversed.
It is so ordered.
Justice Stevens, with whom Justice Ginsburg joins as to Part II, dissenting.
… As the majority itself must tacitly admit, the terms of the [Fifteenth] Amendment itself do not here apply. The OHA voter qualification speaks in terms of ancestry and current residence, not of race or color. …
Presumably recognizing this distinction, the majority relies on the fact that “[a]ncestry can be a proxy for race.” That is, of course, true, but it by no means follows that ancestry is always a proxy for race. Cases in which ancestry served as such a proxy are dramatically different from this one. … [T]he voting laws held invalid under the Fifteenth Amendment in all of the cases cited by the majority were fairly and properly viewed through a specialized lens — a lens honed in specific detail to reveal the realities of time, place, and history behind the voting restrictions being tested.
That lens not only fails to clarify, it fully obscures the realities of this case, virtually the polar opposite of the Fifteenth Amendment cases on which the Court relies. … Cases such as these that “strike down these voting systems … designed to exclude one racial class (at least) from voting, “have no application to a system designed to empower politically the remaining members of a class of once sovereign, indigenous people.
Ancestry surely can be a proxy for race, or a pretext for invidious racial discrimination. But it is simply neither proxy nor pretext here. All of the persons who are eligible to vote for the trustees of OHA share two qualifications that no other person old enough to vote possesses: They are beneficiaries of the public trust created by the State and administered by OHA, and they have at least one ancestor who was a resident of Hawaii in 1778. A trust whose terms provide that the trustees shall be elected by a class including beneficiaries is hardly a novel concept. The Committee that drafted the voting qualification explained that the trustees here should be elected by the beneficiaries because “people to whom assets belong should have control over them …” …
In this light, it is easy to understand why the classification here is not “demeaning” at all, for it is simply not based on the “premise that citizens of a particular race are somehow more qualified than others to vote on certain matters,” It is based on the permissible assumption in this context that families with “any” ancestor who lived in Hawaii in 1778, and whose ancestors thereafter continued to live in Hawaii, have a claim to compensation and selfdetermination that others do not. For the multiracial majority of the citizens of the State of Hawaii to recognize that deep reality is not to demean their own interests but to honor those of others. …
The Court today ignores the overwhelming differences between the Fifteenth Amendment case law on which it relies and the unique history of the State of Hawaii. The former recalls an age of abject discrimination against an insular minority in the old South; the latter at long last yielded the “political consensus” the majority claims it seeks — a consensus determined to recognize the special claim to self-determination of the indigenous peoples of Hawaii. …
Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.
Crawford v. Marion County Election Board et al (2008)
553 U.S. 181 (2008)
Vote: 6-3
Decision: Affirmed
Plurality: Stevens, joined by Roberts, Kennedy
Concurrence: Scalia, joined by Thomas, Alito
Dissent: Souter, joined by Ginsburg
Dissent: Breyer
Justice STEVENS announced the judgment of the Court and delivered an opinion, in which THE CHIEF JUSTICE and Justice KENNEDY join.
At issue in these cases is the constitutionality of an Indiana statute requiring citizens voting in person on election day, or casting a ballot in person at the office of the circuit court clerk prior to election day, to present photo identification issued by the government.
Referred to as either the “Voter ID Law” or “SEA 483,” the statute applies to in-person voting at both primary and general elections. The requirement does not apply to absentee ballots submitted by mail, and the statute contains an exception for persons living and voting in a state-licensed facility such as a nursing home. A voter who is indigent or has a religious objection to being photographed may cast a provisional ballot that will be counted only if she executes an appropriate affidavit before the circuit court clerk within 10 days following the election. A voter who has photo identification but is unable to present that identification on election day may file a provisional ballot that will be counted if she brings her photo identification to the circuit court clerk’s office within 10 days. No photo identification is required in order to register to vote, and the State offers free photo identification to qualified voters able to establish their residence and identity. …
The complaints in the consolidated cases allege that the new law substantially burdens the right to vote in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment; that it is neither a necessary nor appropriate method of avoiding election fraud; and that it will arbitrarily disfranchise qualified voters who do not possess the required identification and will place an unjustified burden on those who cannot readily obtain such identification. …
In Harper v. Virginia Bd. of Elections (1966), the Court held that Virginia could not condition the right to vote in a state election on the payment of a poll tax of $1.50. We rejected the dissenters’ argument that the interest in promoting civic responsibility by weeding out those voters who did not care enough about public affairs to pay a small sum for the privilege of voting provided a rational basis for the tax. Applying a stricter standard, we concluded that a State “violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment whenever it makes the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee an electoral standard.” … Although the State’s justification for the tax was rational, it was invidious because it was irrelevant to the voter’s qualifications.
Thus, under the standard applied in Harper, even rational restrictions on the right to vote are invidious if they are unrelated to voter qualifications. In Anderson v. Celebrezze (1983), however, we confirmed the general rule that “evenhanded restrictions that protect the integrity and reliability of the electoral process itself” are not invidious and satisfy the standard set forth in Harper. Rather than applying any “litmus test” that would neatly separate valid from invalid restrictions, we concluded that a court must identify and evaluate the interests put forward by the State as justifications for the burden imposed by its rule, and then make the “hard judgment” that our adversary system demands.
… However slight that burden may appear, as Harper demonstrates, it must be justified by relevant and legitimate state interests “sufficiently weighty to justify the limitation.” Norman v. Reed (1992). We therefore begin our analysis of the constitutionality of Indiana’s statute by focusing on those interests.
The State has identified several state interests that arguably justify the burdens that SEA 483 imposes on voters and potential voters. … Each is unquestionably relevant to the State’s interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process.
The first is the interest in deterring and detecting voter fraud. The State has a valid interest in participating in a nationwide effort to improve and modernize election procedures that have been criticized as antiquated and inefficient. The State also argues that it has a particular interest in preventing voter fraud in response to a problem that is in part the product of its own maladministration — namely, that Indiana’s voter registration rolls include a large number of names of persons who are either deceased or no longer live in Indiana. Finally, the State relies on its interest in safeguarding voter confidence. Each of these interests merits separate comment.
Election Modernization
Two recently enacted federal statutes have made it necessary for States to reexamine their election procedures. Both contain provisions consistent with a State’s choice to use government-issued photo identification as a relevant source of information concerning a citizen’s eligibility to vote.
In the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), Congress established procedures that would both increase the number of registered voters and protect the integrity of the electoral process. …
In HAVA [Help America Vote Act], Congress required every State to create and maintain a computerized statewide list of all registered voters. …
HAVA also imposes new identification requirements for individuals registering to vote for the first time who submit their applications by mail. If the voter is casting his ballot in person, he must present local election officials with written identification, which may be either “a current and valid photo identification” or another form of documentation such as a bank statement or paycheck. If the voter is voting by mail, he must include a copy of the identification with his ballot. …
Of course, neither HAVA nor NVRA required Indiana to enact SEA 483, but they do indicate that Congress believes that photo identification is one effective method of establishing a voter’s qualification to vote and that the integrity of elections is enhanced through improved technology. That conclusion is also supported by a report issued shortly after the enactment of SEA 483 by the Commission on Federal Election Reform chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III …
Voter Fraud
The only kind of voter fraud that SEA 483 addresses is in-person voter impersonation at polling places. The record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history. Moreover, petitioners argue that provisions of the Indiana Criminal Code punishing such conduct as a felony provide adequate protection against the risk that such conduct will occur in the future. It remains true, however, that flagrant examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists, that occasional examples have surfaced in recent years, and that Indiana’s own experience with fraudulent voting in the 2003 Democratic primary for East Chicago Mayor — though perpetrated using absentee ballots and not in-person fraud — demonstrate that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.
There is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters. … While the most effective method of preventing election fraud may well be debatable, the propriety of doing so is perfectly clear.
In its brief, the State argues that the inflation of its voter rolls provides further support for its enactment of SEA 483. … Even though Indiana’s own negligence may have contributed to the serious inflation of its registration lists when SEA 483 was enacted, the fact of inflated voter rolls does provide a neutral and nondiscriminatory reason supporting the State’s decision to require photo identification.
Safeguarding Voter Confidence
Finally, the State contends that it has an interest in protecting public confidence “in the integrity and legitimacy of representative government.” While that interest is closely related to the State’s interest in preventing voter fraud, public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process has independent significance, because it encourages citizen participation in the democratic process. As the Carter-Baker Report observed, the “`electoral system cannot inspire public confidence if no safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud or to confirm the identity of voters.'”
States employ different methods of identifying eligible voters at the polls. … A photo identification requirement imposes some burdens on voters that other methods of identification do not share. …
The burdens that are relevant to the issue before us are those imposed on persons who are eligible to vote but do not possess a current photo identification that complies with the requirements of SEA 483. The fact that most voters already possess a valid driver’s license, or some other form of acceptable identification, would not save the statute under our reasoning in Harper, if the State required voters to pay a tax or a fee to obtain a new photo identification. But just as other States provide free voter registration cards, the photo identification cards issued by Indiana’s BMV [Bureau of Motor Vehicles] are also free. For most voters who need them, the inconvenience of making a trip to the BMV, gathering the required documents, and posing for a photograph surely does not qualify as a substantial burden on the right to vote, or even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.
Both evidence in the record and facts of which we may take judicial notice, however, indicate that a somewhat heavier burden may be placed on a limited number of persons. They include elderly persons born out of State, who may have difficulty obtaining a birth certificate; persons who because of economic or other personal limitations may find it difficult either to secure a copy of their birth certificate or to assemble the other required documentation to obtain a state-issued identification; homeless persons; and persons with a religious objection to being photographed. If we assume, as the evidence suggests, that some members of these classes were registered voters when SEA 483 was enacted, the new identification requirement may have imposed a special burden on their right to vote.
The severity of that burden is, of course, mitigated by the fact that, if eligible, voters without photo identification may cast provisional ballots that will ultimately be counted. To do so, however, they must travel to the circuit court clerk’s office within 10 days to execute the required affidavit. It is unlikely that such a requirement would pose a constitutional problem unless it is wholly unjustified. And even assuming that the burden may not be justified as to a few voters, that conclusion is by no means sufficient to establish petitioners’ right to the relief they seek in this litigation.
Given the fact that petitioners have advanced a broad attack on the constitutionality of SEA 483, seeking relief that would invalidate the statute in all its applications, they bear a heavy burden of persuasion. …
Petitioners ask this Court, in effect, to perform a unique balancing analysis that looks specifically at a small number of voters who may experience a special burden under the statute and weighs their burdens against the State’s broad interests in protecting election integrity. … But on the basis of the evidence in the record it is not possible to quantify either the magnitude of the burden on this narrow class of voters or the portion of the burden imposed on them that is fully justified.
First, the evidence in the record does not provide us with the number of registered voters without photo identification … Much of the argument about the numbers of such voters comes from extrarecord, postjudgment studies, the accuracy of which has not been tested in the trial court.
Further, the deposition evidence presented in the District Court does not provide any concrete evidence of the burden imposed on voters who currently lack photo identification …
The record says virtually nothing about the difficulties faced by either indigent voters or voters with religious objections to being photographed. … From this limited evidence we do not know the magnitude of the impact SEA 483 will have on indigent voters in Indiana. …
In sum, on the basis of the record that has been made in this litigation, we cannot conclude that the statute imposes “excessively burdensome requirements” on any class of voters. … When we consider only the statute’s broad application to all Indiana voters we conclude that it “imposes only a limited burden on voters’ rights.” Burdick (1992). The “`precise interests'” advanced by the State are therefore sufficient to defeat petitioners’ facial challenge to SEA 483. …
In their briefs, petitioners stress the fact that all of the Republicans in the General Assembly voted in favor of SEA 483 and the Democrats were unanimous in opposing it. … It is fair to infer that partisan considerations may have played a significant role in the decision to enact SEA 483. If such considerations had provided the only justification for a photo identification requirement, we may also assume that SEA 483 would suffer the same fate as the poll tax at issue in Harper.
But if a nondiscriminatory law is supported by valid neutral justifications, those justifications should not be disregarded simply because partisan interests may have provided one motivation for the votes of individual legislators. The state interests identified as justifications for SEA 483 are both neutral and sufficiently strong to require us to reject petitioners’ facial attack on the statute. The application of the statute to the vast majority of Indiana voters is amply justified by the valid interest in protecting “the integrity and reliability of the electoral process.” Anderson v. Celebrezze (1983).
The judgment of the Court of Appeals is affirmed.
Justice SCALIA, with whom Justice THOMAS and Justice ALITO join, concurring in the judgment.
… To evaluate a law respecting the right to vote — whether it governs voter qualifications, candidate selection, or the voting process — we use the approach set out in Burdick v. Takushi, (1992). This calls for application of a deferential “important regulatory interests” standard for nonsevere, nondiscriminatory restrictions, reserving strict scrutiny for laws that severely restrict the right to vote. … Thus, the first step is to decide whether a challenged law severely burdens the right to vote. Ordinary and widespread burdens, such as those requiring “nominal effort” of everyone, are not severe. Burdens are severe if they go beyond the merely inconvenient.
Of course, we have to identify a burden before we can weigh it. The Indiana law affects different voters differently, but what petitioners view as the law’s several light and heavy burdens are no more than the different impacts of the single burden that the law uniformly imposes on all voters. To vote in person in Indiana, everyone must have and present a photo identification that can be obtained for free. The State draws no classifications, let alone discriminatory ones, except to establish optional absentee and provisional balloting for certain poor, elderly, and institutionalized voters and for religious objectors. …
The Indiana photo-identification law is a generally applicable, nondiscriminatory voting regulation, and our precedents refute the view that individual impacts are relevant to determining the severity of the burden it imposes.
…
The universally applicable requirements of Indiana’s voter-identification law are eminently reasonable. The burden of acquiring, possessing, and showing a free photo identification is simply not severe, because it does not “even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.” And the State’s interests, are sufficient to sustain that minimal burden. That should end the matter. That the State accommodates some voters by permitting (not requiring) the casting of absentee or provisional ballots, is an indulgence — not a constitutional imperative that falls short of what is required.
Justice SOUTER, with whom Justice GINSBURG joins, dissenting.
Indiana’s “Voter ID Law” threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting right of tens of thousands of the State’s citizens and a significant percentage of those individuals are likely to be deterred from voting. The statute is unconstitutional under the balancing standard of Burdick v. Takushi (1992): a State may not burden the right to vote merely by invoking abstract interests, be they legitimate, or even compelling, but must make a particular, factual showing that threats to its interests outweigh the particular impediments it has imposed. The State has made no such justification here, and as to some aspects of its law, it has hardly even tried. …
Under Burdick, “the rigorousness of our inquiry into the propriety of a state election law depends upon the extent to which a challenged regulation burdens First and Fourteenth Amendment rights,” Burdick v. Takushi (1992), upon an assessment of the “`character and magnitude of the asserted [threatened] injury,'” and an estimate of the number of voters likely to be affected.
The first set of burdens shown in these cases is the travel costs and fees necessary to get one of the limited variety of federal or state photo identifications needed to cast a regular ballot under the Voter ID Law. The travel is required for the personal visit to a license branch of the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV), which is demanded of anyone applying for a driver’s license or nondriver photo identification. See Indiana Democractic Party v. Rokita (2006) The need to travel to a BMV branch will affect voters according to their circumstances, with the average person probably viewing it as nothing more than an inconvenience. Poor, old, and disabled voters who do not drive a car, however, may find the trip prohibitive …
The burden of traveling to a more distant BMV office rather than a conveniently located polling place is probably serious for many of the individuals who lack photo identification. They almost certainly will not own cars, and public transportation in Indiana is fairly limited. …
For those voters who can afford the round trip, a second financial hurdle appears: in order to get photo identification for the first time, they need to present “a birth certificate, certificate of naturalization, U.S. veterans photo identification, U.S. military photo identification, or a U.S. passport. … So most voters must pay at least one fee to get the ID necessary to cast a regular ballot. As with the travel costs, these fees are far from shocking on their face, but in the Burdick analysis it matters that both the travel costs and the fees are disproportionately heavy for, and thus disproportionately likely to deter, the poor, the old, and the immobile. …
To be sure, Indiana has a provisional-ballot exception to the ID requirement for individuals the State considers “indigent” as well as those with religious objections to being photographed, and this sort of exception could in theory provide a way around the costs of procuring an ID. But Indiana’s chosen exception does not amount to much relief.
The law allows these voters who lack the necessary ID to sign the pollbook and cast a provisional ballot. As the lead opinion recognizes, though, that is only the first step; to have the provisional ballot counted, a voter must then appear in person before the circuit court clerk or county election board within 10 days of the election, to sign an affidavit attesting to indigency or religious objection to being photographed (or to present an ID at that point). … Forcing these people to travel to the county seat every time they try to vote is particularly onerous for the reason noted already, that most counties in Indiana either lack public transportation or offer only limited coverage. …
Indiana’s Voter ID Law thus threatens to impose serious burdens on the voting right, even if not “severe” ones, and the next question under Burdick is whether the number of individuals likely to be affected is significant as well. Record evidence and facts open to judicial notice answer yes.
… Tens of thousands of voting-age residents lack the necessary photo identification. A large proportion of them are likely to be in bad shape economically. The Voter ID Law places hurdles in the way of either getting an ID or of voting provisionally, and they translate into nontrivial economic costs. There is accordingly no reason to doubt that a significant number of state residents will be discouraged or disabled from voting.
Because the lead opinion finds only “limited” burdens on the right to vote, it avoids a hard look at the State’s claimed interests. But having found the Voter ID Law burdens far from trivial, I have to make a rigorous assessment of “`the precise interests put forward by the State as justifications for the burden imposed by its rule,’ [and] `the extent to which those interests make it necessary to burden the plaintiff’s rights.'” …
There is no denying the abstract importance, the compelling nature, of combating voter fraud. But it takes several steps to get beyond the level of abstraction here.
To begin with, requiring a voter to show photo identification before casting a regular ballot addresses only one form of voter fraud: in-person voter impersonation. The photo identification requirement leaves untouched the problems of absentee-ballot fraud, which (unlike in-person voter impersonation) is a documented problem in Indiana …
And even the State’s interest in deterring a voter from showing up at the polls and claiming to be someone he is not must, in turn, be discounted for the fact that the State has not come across a single instance of in-person voter impersonation fraud in all of Indiana’s history. Neither the District Court nor the Indiana General Assembly that passed the Voter ID Law was given any evidence whatsoever of in-person voter impersonation fraud in the State … [The absence of evidence] is also consistent with the dearth of evidence of in-person voter impersonation in any other part of the country. …
The antifraud rationale is open to skepticism on one further ground, what Burdick spoke of as an assessment of the degree of necessity for the State’s particular course of action. … [T]he State has not even tried to justify its decision to implement the photo identification requirement immediately on passage of the new law. A phase-in period would have given the State time to distribute its newly designed licenses, and to make a genuine effort to get them to individuals in need, and a period for transition is exactly what the Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by former President Carter and former Secretary of State Baker, recommended in its report. …
Although Indiana claims to have adopted its ID requirement relying partly on the Carter-Baker Report, the State conspicuously rejected the Carter-Baker Report’s phase-in recommendation aimed at reducing the burdens on the right to vote, and just as conspicuously fails even to try to explain why. …
… The State’s final justification, its interest in safeguarding voter confidence, similarly collapses. The problem with claiming this interest lies in its connection to the bloated voter rolls; the State has come up with nothing to suggest that its citizens doubt the integrity of the State’s electoral process, except its own failure to maintain its rolls. The answer to this problem is not to burden the right to vote, but to end the official negligence. …
Without a shred of evidence that in-person voter impersonation is a problem in the State, much less a crisis, Indiana has adopted one of the most restrictive photo identification requirements in the country. The State recognizes that tens of thousands of qualified voters lack the necessary federally issued or state-issued identification, but it insists on implementing the requirement immediately, without allowing a transition period for targeted efforts to distribute the required identification to individuals who need it. The State hardly even tries to explain its decision to force indigents or religious objectors to travel all the way to their county seats every time they wish to vote, and if there is any waning of confidence in the administration of elections it probably owes more to the State’s violation of federal election law than to any imposters at the polling places. It is impossible to say, on this record, that the State’s interest in adopting its signally inhibiting photo identification requirement has been shown to outweigh the serious burdens it imposes on the right to vote.
If more were needed to condemn this law, our own precedent would provide it, for the calculation revealed in the Indiana statute crosses a line when it targets the poor and the weak. If the Court’s decision in Harper v. Virginia Bd. of Elections (1966), stands for anything, it is that being poor has nothing to do with being qualified to vote. Harper made clear that “[t]o introduce wealth or payment of a fee as a measure of a voter’s qualifications is to introduce a capricious or irrelevant factor.”
…
The Indiana Voter ID Law is thus unconstitutional: the state interests fail to justify the practical limitations placed on the right to vote, and the law imposes an unreasonable and irrelevant burden on voters who are poor and old. I would vacate the judgment of the Seventh Circuit, and remand for further proceedings.
Justice BREYER, dissenting.
Indiana’s statute requires registered voters to present photo identification at the polls. It imposes a burden upon some voters, but it does so in order to prevent fraud, to build confidence in the voting system, and thereby to maintain the integrity of the voting process. In determining whether this statute violates the Federal Constitution, I would balance the voting-related interests that the statute affects, asking “whether the statute burdens any one such interest in a manner out of proportion to the statute’s salutary effects upon the others (perhaps, but not necessarily, because of the existence of a clearly superior, less restrictive alternative).” Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC (2000). Applying this standard, I believe the statute is unconstitutional because it imposes a disproportionate burden upon those eligible voters who lack a driver’s license or other statutorily valid form of photo ID. …
For one thing, an Indiana nondriver, most likely to be poor, elderly, or disabled, will find it difficult and expensive to travel to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, particularly if he or she resides in one of the many Indiana counties lacking a public transportation system. For another, many of these individuals may be uncertain about how to obtain the underlying documentation, usually a passport or a birth certificate, upon which the statute insists. And some may find the costs associated with these documents unduly burdensome (up to $12 for a copy of a birth certificate; up to $100 for a passport). By way of comparison, this Court previously found unconstitutionally burdensome a poll tax of $1.50 (less than $10 today, inflation adjusted). See Harper v. Virginia Bd. of Elections (1966). Further, Indiana’s exception for voters who cannot afford this cost imposes its own burden: a postelection trip to the county clerk or county election board to sign an indigency affidavit after each election. …
By way of contrast, two other States — Florida and Georgia — have put into practice photo ID requirements significantly less restrictive than Indiana’s. Under the Florida law, the range of permissible forms of photo ID is substantially greater than in Indiana. Moreover, a Florida voter who lacks photo ID may cast a provisional ballot at the polling place that will be counted if the State determines that his signature matches the one on his voter registration form.
Georgia restricts voters to a more limited list of acceptable photo IDs than does Florida, but accepts in addition to proof of voter registration a broader range of underlying documentation than does Indiana. … While Indiana allows only certain groups such as the elderly and disabled to vote by absentee ballot, in Georgia any voter may vote absentee without providing any excuse, and (except where required by federal law) need not present a photo ID in order to do so. Finally, neither Georgia nor Florida insists, as Indiana does, that indigent voters travel each election cycle to potentially distant places for the purposes of signing an indigency affidavit.
The record nowhere provides a convincing reason why Indiana’s photo ID requirement must impose greater burdens than those of other States, or than the Carter-Baker Commission recommended nationwide. Nor is there any reason to think that there are proportionately fewer such voters in Indiana than elsewhere in the country …
… [W]hile the Constitution does not in general prohibit Indiana from enacting a photo ID requirement, this statute imposes a disproportionate burden upon those without valid photo IDs. For these reasons, I dissent.