United States v. REESE
The Supreme Court threw out a federal indictment against two Kentucky election inspectors who refused to count an African American man's vote, ruling that the federal law they were charged under was written too broadly to be valid Fifteenth Amendment enforcement legislation.
Because Congress's power to police state elections came only from the Fifteenth Amendment's ban on race-based voting discrimination, and the challenged sections of the 1870 Enforcement Act punished election misconduct generally without limiting themselves to race, the Court held it could not rewrite the law to add that limitation itself.
“The Fifteenth Amendment does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one. It prevents the States, or the United States, however, from giving preference, in this particular, to one citizen of the United States over another on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
The majority's core explanation of what the Fifteenth Amendment actually protects.
How it got here: Judges on the federal circuit court for Kentucky split on whether the indictment was valid and certified the disputed legal questions to the Supreme Court for resolution.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Two Kentucky election inspectors refused to receive and count the vote of William Garner, a Black citizen, in a municipal election in Lexington. Garner had tried to pay a required capitation tax but the tax collector turned him away because of his race. Garner then tried to vote using an affidavit describing that refusal, but the inspectors rejected his vote anyway. Federal prosecutors indicted the inspectors under the Enforcement Act of 1870.
The question before the Court
Could Congress punish local election inspectors for refusing to count a Black citizen's vote using a law that never actually said the refusal had to be based on race?
Why it matters
The ruling weakened one of Reconstruction's key tools for prosecuting officials who blocked Black citizens from voting, at a moment when such prosecutions were central to enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment in the South. Going forward, Congress would need to draft voting-rights criminal statutes with explicit, precise race-based language, or risk having them struck down as exceeding its constitutional authority.
What changes now
This is a final merits decision. Because the Court found no valid federal statute supporting the charges, the circuit court's judgment discharging the inspectors stood, and the case did not return for further proceedings. The ruling did not touch the first section of the Enforcement Act (which simply declares the right to vote free of racial discrimination) or Congress's separate power over congressional elections, leaving those questions for future cases.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Congress could validly punish race-based denials of the vote through a more carefully worded statute, nor did it address Congress's separate constitutional authority over elections for senators and representatives. It also left untouched the first section of the Act, which simply declares the right to vote without regard to race.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Clifford
Justice Clifford agreed the indictment was bad but for entirely different, narrower reasons. He argued the counts failed simply because they did not properly allege every fact needed to show the defendants' conduct matched the statute's requirements, such as Garner's readiness and ability to actually pay the tax. He did not reach or endorse the majority's constitutional ruling that the statute's sections were themselves invalid.
Dissent — Justice Hunt
“I hold, therefore, that the third and fourth sections of the statute we are considering do provide for the punishment of inspectors of elections who refuse the votes of qualified electors on account of their race or color.”Hunt's central disagreement with the majority's reading of the statute's scope.
Justice Hunt argued the statute's repeated use of the phrase "as aforesaid" incorporated the race-based limitations from earlier sections into the third and fourth sections, so the law was already properly limited to racial discrimination. He also argued the Fifteenth Amendment covers all elections, state and federal, and that Congress clearly had power to enforce it through criminal penalties, so he would have reversed and ordered a trial.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court began from the rule that federal courts cannot punish conduct as a federal crime unless Congress has clearly said so, meaning the indictment could stand only if the Enforcement Act itself validly covered this conduct.
- The Fifteenth Amendment does not itself grant anyone a right to vote; it only bars the government from denying or limiting voting because of race, color, or previous slavery. Congress's power to pass criminal voting laws comes entirely from enforcing that narrow anti-discrimination rule, not from any broader authority over elections.
- Because this is a penal (criminal) statute, its language must be read strictly, and courts should not stretch or narrow its wording to make it fit what Congress may have intended if the words themselves do not say so.
- Sections 3 and 4 of the Enforcement Act punished election officials and private individuals for wrongfully blocking any citizen's vote, but contained no words limiting that punishment to refusals motivated by race, color, or previous slavery.
- Reading a race-based limitation into the statute would mean the Court inserting words Congress never wrote, rather than simply enforcing the law as passed; the Court held this was not a proper judicial function and would amount to writing new legislation.
- Because the sections could not be split into a valid, race-limited part and an invalid, general part, the entire provisions fell outside Congress's Fifteenth Amendment authority as applied to this indictment, so no valid federal crime existed for the inspectors' conduct.