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Page Number: 8.0

2 

BRNOVICH v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE 

Opinion of the Court 

States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  But an en 
banc court, by a divided vote, found them to be unlawful.  It 
relied on the rules’ small disparate impacts on members of 
minority groups, as well as past discrimination dating back 
to the State’s territorial days.  And it overturned the Dis-
trict  Court’s  finding  that  the  Arizona  Legislature  did  not 
adopt  the  ballot-collection  restriction  for  a  discriminatory 
purpose.    We  now  hold  that  the  en  banc  court  misunder-
stood and misapplied §2 and that it exceeded its authority 
in rejecting the District Court’s factual finding on the issue 
of legislative intent. 

I 
A 
  Congress  enacted  the  landmark  Voting  Rights  Act  of 
1965, 79 Stat. 437, as amended, 52 U. S. C. §10301 et seq., 
in  an  effort  to  achieve  at  long  last  what  the  Fifteenth 
Amendment had sought to bring about 95 years earlier: an 
end to the denial of the right to vote based on race.  Ratified 
in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment provides in §1 that “[t]he 
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  of  the  Amendment  then  grants  Congress  the 
“power to enforce [the Amendment] by appropriate legisla-
tion.” 
  Despite the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, the 
right of African-Americans to vote was heavily suppressed 
for nearly a century.  States employed a variety of notorious 
methods,  including  poll  taxes,  literacy  tests,  property 
qualifications,  “ ‘white  primar[ies],’ ”  and  “ ‘grandfather 
clause[s].’ ”1  Challenges to some blatant efforts reached this 
Court and were held to violate the Fifteenth Amendment.  

—————— 

1 H. R. Rep. No. 439, 89th Cong., 1st Sess., 8, 11–13 (1965); S. Rep. No. 
162, 89th Cong., 1st Sess., pt. 3, pp. 4–5 (1965); see South Carolina v. 
Katzenbach, 383 U. S. 301, 309–315 (1966).