Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/12pdf/12-71_7l48.pdf
Page Number: 14

Cite as:  570 U. S. ____ (2013) 

11 

Opinion of the Court 

Clause legislation, “so far as it extends and conflicts with
the regulations of the State, necessarily supersedes them.”
100 U. S., at 384.  There is good reason for treating Elec-
tions  Clause  legislation  differently:  The  assumption  that 
Congress  is  reluctant  to  pre-empt  does  not  hold  when
Congress  acts  under  that  constitutional  provision,  which
empowers Congress to “make or alter” state election regu-
lations.  Art.  I,  §4,  cl. 1.    When  Congress  legislates  with 
respect  to  the  “Times,  Places  and  Manner”  of  holding 
congressional  elections,  it  necessarily  displaces  some 
element  of  a  pre-existing  legal  regime  erected  by  the
States.6  Because the power the Elections Clause confers is 

—————— 

“With it thus clearly established that the policy of Congress for so 
great  a  part  of  our  constitutional  life  has  been,  and  now  is,  to 
leave the conduct of the election of its members to state laws, ad-
ministered by state officers, and that whenever it has assumed to 
regulate  such  elections  it  has  done  so  by  positive  and  clear  stat-
utes,  such  as  were  enacted  in  1870,  it  would  be  a  strained  and 
unreasonable construction to apply to such elections this §37, orig-
inally  a  law  for  the  protection  of  the  revenue  and  for  now  fifty 
years  confined  in  its  application  to  ‘Offenses  against  the  Opera-
tions  of  the  Government’  as  distinguished  from  the  processes  by
which men are selected to conduct such operations.”  243 U. S., at 
485. 

Gradwell  says  nothing  at  all  about  pre-emption,  or  about  how  to  con-
strue  statutes  (like  the  NVRA)  in  which  Congress  has  indisputably 
undertaken “to regulate such elections.”  Ibid. 

6 The dissent counters that this is so “whenever Congress legislates in
an  area  of  concurrent  state  and  federal  power.”    Post,  at  5  (opinion  of
ALITO, J.).  True, but irrelevant: Elections Clause legislation is unique
precisely because it always falls within an area of concurrent state and 
federal  power.  Put  differently,  all  action  under  the  Elections  Clause 
displaces  some  element  of  a  pre-existing  state  regulatory  regime, 
because the text of the Clause confers the power to do exactly (and only)
that.  By  contrast,  even  laws  enacted  under  the  Commerce  Clause
(arguably the other enumerated power whose exercise is most likely to
trench on state regulatory authority) will not always implicate concur-
rent  state  power—a  prohibition  on  the  interstate  transport  of  a  com-
modity, for example.