Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1970

Oregon v. Mitchell

400 U.S. 112 | 91 S. Ct. 260 | 27 L. Ed. 2d 272 | 1970 U.S. LEXIS 1

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Takeaway

In short, Oregon v. Mitchell produced a fractured Court: Congress could set the voting age at 18 for federal elections, but not for state and local elections; it could also ban literacy tests nationwide and protect mobile citizens’ voting rights in presidential elections. The state-election ruling helped prompt the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which soon constitutionalized an 18-year-old vote nationwide.

Background

Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act Amendments of 1970. The Act (1) lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in federal, state, and local elections; (2) suspended literacy tests and similar devices nationwide for five years; and (3) abolished durational-residency requirements and required specified absentee-voting opportunities in presidential elections.

Oregon and Texas brought original actions against the Attorney General to block the 18-year-old voting provisions. The United States brought original actions against Arizona and Idaho to compel compliance with the literacy-test, voting-age, and presidential-residency provisions. Because the cases were filed in the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction, there was no lower-court judgment to review.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Congress could require every State to permit citizens age 18 and older to vote in federal elections.

Holding

Yes. The 18-year-old voting provision was constitutional and enforceable in elections for federal offices.

Reasoning

Justice Black concluded that Article I, § 4 gives Congress ultimate supervisory authority over the “Times, Places and Manner” of congressional elections. Read with the Necessary and Proper Clause and the Court’s prior election cases, that power was broad enough to let Congress alter voter qualifications for federal elections, including the minimum voting age.

Black reasoned that Congress’s authority over federal elections had historically extended beyond mere mechanics. Congress could regulate districting, registration, voting procedures, fraud prevention, vote counting, and other measures needed to ensure representative national elections. Allowing 18-year-olds to vote was, in his view, a less consequential exercise of that authority than Congress’s undisputed authority to regulate congressional districts.

The Court also sustained the voting-age provision as applied to presidential and vice-presidential elections. Black viewed Congress’s authority to secure responsive national elections as extending to the selection of presidential electors as well as members of Congress.

No single rationale commanded a majority. Justice Black relied on Congress’s election-regulation power; Justices Douglas, Brennan, White, and Marshall agreed with the federal-election result but would have upheld the provision under Congress’s Fourteenth Amendment enforcement power.

Issue #2

Whether Congress could require States to permit citizens age 18 and older to vote in state and local elections.

Holding

No. The 18-year-old voting provision was unconstitutional and unenforceable in state and local elections.

Reasoning

Five Justices agreed on this result, but not on a single theory. Justice Black, joined on the judgment by the Chief Justice and Justices Harlan, Stewart, and Blackmun, concluded that the Constitution generally leaves voter qualifications for state and local offices to the States, subject to express constitutional limits.

Black rejected the argument that Congress could use § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to lower the voting age in state elections. In his view, the Civil War Amendments gave Congress broad power to combat racial discrimination, but they did not transfer to Congress a general power to revise every state electoral qualification.

Congress had made no finding, supported by substantial evidence, that the age-21 requirement was a device for racial discrimination. Because the voting-age provision invaded a domain reserved to the States without a sufficient Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendment basis, it could not govern state and local elections.

The invalid state-and-local application was severable from the valid federal application. Congress had included a broad severability clause, and enforcing an 18-year-old vote in federal elections did not depend on enforcing it in state or local elections.

Issue #3

Whether Congress could impose a nationwide, five-year ban on literacy tests and similar voting devices in federal, state, and local elections.

Holding

Yes. The nationwide literacy-test ban was a valid exercise of Congress’s power to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment.

Reasoning

The Court unanimously upheld the ban. Congress had substantial evidence that literacy tests had been used to deny or abridge voting rights on account of race and that unequal educational opportunities made ostensibly neutral tests operate discriminatorily against racial minorities.

Congress could reasonably conclude that literacy tests had been used to suppress Black, Spanish-speaking, Native American, and other minority voters. The legislative record also showed that voter registration was generally higher in States without literacy tests and that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had substantially improved minority registration where its protections applied.

A nationwide prohibition was appropriate because discrimination in voting and unequal educational opportunity were national problems, not problems confined to one region. Under the Fifteenth Amendment’s Enforcement Clause, the federal statute superseded Arizona’s contrary literacy-test requirement.

Issue #4

Whether Congress could displace state durational-residency requirements and require absentee-voting procedures for presidential elections.

Holding

Yes. Congress could abolish durational-residency barriers and prescribe the statutory absentee-voting protections for presidential elections.

Reasoning

Justice Black concluded that Congress’s broad authority to regulate federal elections included authority to protect citizens’ effective participation in elections for President and Vice President. The statute sought to ensure that citizens who moved between States would not lose their ability to vote for national executive offices merely because they had not lived in their new jurisdiction long enough.

The statute required States to allow otherwise qualified new residents to register up to 30 days before a presidential election. It also required absentee-registration and absentee-balloting opportunities and permitted persons who moved too close to the election to vote in their former State, subject to the statute’s conditions.

Eight Justices upheld this provision, though they disagreed about its constitutional basis. Justice Black relied on federal authority over national elections; Justice Stewart relied principally on Congress’s power to protect the constitutional privilege of interstate travel; and Justices Douglas, Brennan, White, and Marshall relied on Congress’s Fourteenth Amendment enforcement power. Justice Harlan dissented.

Concurrences

Justice Douglas

Reasoning

Justice Douglas agreed that Congress could lower the voting age for federal elections, uphold the literacy-test ban, and regulate residency and absentee voting in presidential elections. He disagreed only with invalidating the 18-year-old vote in state and local elections.

Douglas would have sustained the voting-age provision across the board under the Equal Protection and Privileges or Immunities Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. He treated voting as a fundamental civil right and concluded that Congress, under § 5, could determine that excluding otherwise qualified 18-year-olds from the franchise denied equal protection.

In his view, Congress had a rational basis for concluding that 18-year-olds possessed sufficient maturity to vote. Congress could take account of their military obligations, adult criminal responsibility, capacity to marry and contract under many state laws, and the lack of compulsory education beyond age 18.

Douglas also concluded that Congress could suspend literacy tests under § 5 because such tests could perpetuate inequality caused by unequal education. He viewed the presidential-residency provision as a permissible means of protecting the national-citizenship privilege to vote for national officers and the right to interstate travel.

Justice Harlan

Reasoning

Justice Harlan agreed with the judgment upholding the nationwide literacy-test ban and invalidating the 18-year-old vote in state and local elections. He would, however, also have invalidated the voting-age provision as applied to federal elections and the presidential-residency provision.

Harlan’s central argument was historical and structural. The original Constitution committed voter qualifications for both state and federal elections to the States, and the Fourteenth Amendment was not understood by its framers or ratifiers to transfer that authority to Congress or the federal judiciary.

He read § 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which penalized States that denied the vote to adult male citizens, as powerful evidence that § 1 did not itself prohibit States from setting voter qualifications. The later Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-Fourth Amendments likewise showed that specific constitutional amendments, rather than ordinary legislation, were needed to curb state control over voting qualifications.

Harlan nevertheless upheld the literacy-test ban under the Fifteenth Amendment. Congress could reasonably find that literacy tests were especially susceptible to racial discrimination, including discriminatory application and discriminatory effects flowing from unequal education.

Justice Stewart

Reasoning

Justice Stewart, joined by the Chief Justice and Justice Blackmun, agreed with the literacy-test ban, the presidential-residency provision, and the invalidation of the 18-year-old vote in state and local elections. He dissented from the holding that Congress could establish an 18-year-old voting age in federal elections.

Stewart agreed that Congress could ban literacy tests nationwide under the Fifteenth Amendment. Congress could respond to racial discrimination with a uniform national remedy and was not required to make separate factual findings for every State.

He upheld the presidential-residency provision on a different ground from Justice Black. Freedom to travel and settle in another State is a privilege of national citizenship, and Congress could protect that privilege from state laws that penalized a move by causing disenfranchisement in presidential elections.

Stewart rejected Justice Black’s conclusion that Article I, § 4 lets Congress alter voter qualifications in congressional elections. Article I, § 2 and the Seventeenth Amendment expressly tie federal voter qualifications to those for the most numerous branch of each State’s legislature, while Article I, § 4 permits Congress to regulate election procedures, not to redefine who is qualified to vote.

Dissents

Justice Brennan

Reasoning

Justice Brennan, joined by Justices White and Marshall, dissented from the judgment invalidating the 18-year-old vote in state and local elections. They would have upheld the 1970 Amendments in full.

They reasoned that state authority over voter qualifications is subject to the Equal Protection Clause. Because voting is fundamental, a State must show that an exclusion from the franchise is necessary to serve a compelling state interest.

In their view, Congress had ample evidence to conclude that people between 18 and 21 were not materially less mature or responsible than people 21 and older. States generally treated 18-year-olds as adults for criminal responsibility, permitted them to marry, did not require them to attend school, and had long allowed 18-year-olds to vote successfully in Georgia and Kentucky.

Under § 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress could independently assess the factual assumptions supporting a state voting classification. The Court’s role was limited to asking whether Congress had a rational basis for finding that the age-21 rule did not serve a compelling state interest. The legislative record readily met that standard.

The joint opinion also defended the nationwide literacy-test ban as a Fifteenth Amendment remedy for the continuing effects of racially unequal education. It upheld the presidential-residency provision as a reasonable means of eliminating an unnecessary burden on the constitutional right of interstate migration.