Oregon v. Mitchell
In a deeply splintered ruling with no majority opinion, the Supreme Court upheld Congress's power to lower the voting age to 18 for federal elections but struck that down for state and local elections, while unanimously upholding a nationwide ban on literacy tests and, by a wide margin, a relaxation of residency rules for presidential voting.
The mismatched result meant states would have to run separate voting-age rules for federal versus state and local races, a problem so unworkable that it helped push Congress and the states to ratify the Twenty-Sixth Amendment within months, extending 18-year-old voting to every election.
“In summary, it is the judgment of the Court that the 18-year-old vote provisions of the Voting Rights Act Amendments of 1970 are constitutional and enforceable insofar as they pertain to federal elections and unconstitutional and unenforceable insofar as they pertain to state and local elections.”
Black's summary of the Court's fractured bottom-line holding on the voting-age provision.
How it got here: Oregon and Texas sued the U.S. Attorney General, and the United States sued Arizona and Idaho, all invoking the Supreme Court's original jurisdiction to resolve the states' challenges to the new federal voting law.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Congress passed the Voting Rights Act Amendments of 1970, which lowered the voting age to 18 in all elections, banned literacy tests nationwide for five years, and eliminated durational residency requirements and eased absentee-voting rules for presidential elections. Oregon, Texas, Arizona, and Idaho objected, arguing the law intruded on powers the Constitution reserves to the states to set their own voters' qualifications.
The question before the Court
Congress had just lowered the voting age to 18, banned literacy tests nationwide, and eased residency rules for president. Could it do all of that by ordinary law, without a constitutional amendment?
The Court's answer
Partly. One five-vote majority held that Congress could lower the voting age to 18 for federal elections — President, Vice President, senators, and representatives — because the Constitution gives Congress broad authority to regulate the manner of holding federal elections. A different five-vote majority held that Congress could not force states to lower the voting age for their own state and local elections, because the Constitution leaves states in charge of qualifications for state offices and Congress had not shown the 21-year-old rule was used to discriminate by race.
On the other two pieces of the law, the Court was more unified: all nine Justices agreed Congress could ban literacy tests nationwide under its power to stop racial discrimination in voting, and a large majority agreed Congress could scrap durational residency requirements for presidential voting. Because no opinion could command five votes for one shared rationale, the ruling was pieced together from several separate opinions rather than a single majority decision.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
The ruling meant 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds could vote for President and Congress in 1972 but not for many state and local offices, forcing election officials to maintain separate ballots, registration lists, and polling procedures by age and office. The administrative chaos this threatened to create was a major reason the Twenty-Sixth Amendment was proposed and ratified within months, settling the voting-age question nationwide.
What changes now
This was a final merits decision, but its practical unworkability — different voting ages for federal versus state and local races in the same election — quickly became a major problem for election administrators nationwide. Within months, Congress proposed the Twenty-Sixth Amendment lowering the voting age to 18 for all elections, and the states ratified it in the summer of 1971, mooting the state-and-local piece of this ruling going forward.
What this does not decide
The decision does not establish a general rule that Congress can set voter qualifications for any office; the federal-elections holding rested on a specific reading of Congress's power over the "manner" of federal elections, and no single opinion commanded five votes for the same legal theory. The mismatch it created between federal and state voting ages was resolved months later by the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, not by this ruling itself.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent in part — Justice Douglas
Justice Douglas would have upheld the 18-year-old vote across the board, including in state and local elections, relying on the Equal Protection and Privileges and Immunities Clauses rather than Congress's power over federal election mechanics. He agreed with upholding the literacy-test ban and residency changes but dissented from the part of the judgment striking down the state-and-local voting-age provision.
Dissent in part — Justice Harlan
“these cases bring us to a crossroad that is marked with a formidable "Stop" sign”Harlan warning that prior voting-rights precedents should not be extended to let Congress override state voter qualifications.
Justice Harlan conducted an exhaustive historical review concluding the Fourteenth Amendment was never meant to let Congress or courts set voter qualifications at all, in either state or federal elections, so he would have struck down the 18-year-old vote and residency provisions entirely. He would have upheld only the literacy-test suspension, and solely as an exercise of Congress's Fifteenth Amendment power.
Dissent in part — Justice Brennan
Justice Brennan, joined by White and Marshall, argued Congress could lower the voting age to 18 in both state and federal elections under its Fourteenth Amendment enforcement power, because Congress could rationally find that excluding 18-to-20-year-olds was not necessary to any compelling state interest. They therefore dissented from the part of the judgment invalidating the provision as to state and local elections, while agreeing with the literacy-test and residency holdings.
Dissent in part — Justice Stewart
Justice Stewart, joined by the Chief Justice and Justice Blackmun, agreed the literacy-test ban and the presidential residency changes were constitutional, but on different grounds than Justice Black — resting the residency ruling on Congress's power to protect the right to interstate travel. He dissented from upholding the 18-year-old vote even for federal elections, arguing the Constitution fixes voter qualifications for federal office and withholds from Congress any power to change them by ordinary legislation.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- Justice Black's opinion, which announced the judgments of the Court, read the Elections Clause (Article I, Section 4) as giving Congress broad, near-total power over the times, places, and manner of federal elections, including who may vote in them — power he found sufficient to let Congress set an 18-year-old voting age for President, the Senate, and the House.
- Applying a different framework to state and local elections, Black concluded that nothing in Article I or the Fourteenth Amendment's enforcement power let Congress override the states' historic authority over their own elections, because Congress had made no finding that the 21-year-old requirement was being used to discriminate on the basis of race.
- On the literacy-test ban, separate opinions converged on the same result: Congress could rely on its power under the Fifteenth Amendment's enforcement clause — the provision letting Congress pass laws to stop racial discrimination in voting — to conclude that literacy tests, even where neutral on their face, were often used or had the effect of disenfranchising racial minorities nationwide, not just in the South.
- On the residency and absentee-voting rules for presidential elections, most Justices agreed Congress could act either under its power over federal elections or its power to protect the constitutional right to travel between states, reasoning that durational residency requirements needlessly burdened people who had recently moved.
- Because no single rationale commanded five votes on the state-and-local-elections question, the final results were tallied vote-by-vote on each bottom-line judgment rather than through one controlling opinion, producing three separate holdings on the three parts of the statute.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms South Carolina v. Katzenbach (383 U.S. 301)
Relied on again to confirm Congress can nationally ban literacy tests under the Fifteenth Amendment.
Distinguishes Katzenbach v. Morgan (384 U.S. 641)
Stewart's opinion says extending Morgan's rationale to justify the voting-age law would go too far beyond its facts.