Module 29: The Fifteenth Amendment

Where the Fifteenth Amendment Came From

By the winter of 1868 the Constitution said that slavery was over (Amendment XIII) and that people born or naturalized in the United States were citizens (Amendment XIV). It did not say that Black men could vote. The Fourteenth Amendment's second section shows the gap. It reduces a state's representation in the House when the vote is denied to "male inhabitants" who are twenty-one and citizens, "except for participation in rebellion, or other crime."¹ That is a penalty for excluding voters, written so that a state could still exclude them and accept the loss. It is not a rule that the vote must be given.

Republicans in Congress also had a political worry. Wikipedia's account says they expected to lose seats in the next Congress and used the lame-duck session that began in December 1868 to put the protection of Black suffrage into the Constitution.² A statute can be repealed, and a state constitution can be rewritten. A constitutional amendment can be undone by neither.

The text that came out of Congress was a compromise, and the compromise was about more than the South. According to the same account, Representatives from the North, where nativism was a major force, wanted to preserve restrictions on foreign-born citizens, and Representatives from the West, where ethnic Chinese people were banned from voting, wanted the same. Republicans in both regions also wanted to keep denying the vote for a time to Southerners disenfranchised for supporting the Confederacy, and worried that a sweeping text would enfranchise them.²

This lesson follows the amendment in five stages: how the text was written and ratified; how the Supreme Court first read it; the devices states used to get around it and the cases that struck some of them down; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its history through 2013; and the decisions of 2021 to 2026, ending with Louisiana v. Callais, decided April 29, 2026. Idaho appears throughout. Idaho had no vote on the amendment, because it was a territory until it became the 43rd state on July 3, 1890.³ But the state's own voting law, its one county covered by the Voting Rights Act, and its treatment of Native American voters all connect to the amendment's text.

The Text, Word by Word

Section 1. The 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. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

U.S. Const. amend. XV⁴

Congress passed it on February 26, 1869, and the states ratified it on February 3, 1870.⁴⁵ Each phrase does its own work.

"The right of citizens of the United States to vote"

The subject is citizens, and the verb is "to vote." The amendment does not define who may vote, and it does not create a right to vote out of nothing. It assumes the right exists under state law and forbids one way of taking it away. The Supreme Court said so in 1876, and that reading has never been overruled.

"shall not be denied or abridged"

"Denied" covers a flat refusal: a registrar who will not register a Black applicant. "Abridged" reaches burdens short of refusal, such as a rule that makes voting harder for one group than another. How far "abridged" reaches is contested. When a claim rests on the Constitution itself, the Court has asked for proof of a racial purpose. When it rests on the Voting Rights Act, the test depends on how Section 2 is read, a question the Court answered in a new way in April 2026.

"by the United States or by any State"

The ban binds both levels of government. It does not mention private actors, and the Court's early decisions treated the amendment as a limit on government and not on private conduct.

"on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude"

Only three grounds are named. Sex, property, education, religion and birthplace are not. Representative John Bingham, the main author of the Fourteenth Amendment, pushed for a text that would also have barred limits based on "nativity, property, education, or religious beliefs." The House rejected it, and a proposal to ban literacy tests by name was also rejected.² The omissions made the amendment easier to pass. They also left the poll tax and the literacy test lawful for decades, until the Twenty-fourth Amendment, the Voting Rights Act, and later decisions reached them.

"The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation"

Section 2 is the source of the Voting Rights Act. In South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966) the Court read "appropriate" as it had read the Necessary and Proper Clause in McCulloch v. Maryland: Congress may choose any means that is plainly adapted to the end and not prohibited.⁶ Sixty years later, in Callais, the majority wrote that Congress cannot "enforce a constitutional right by changing what the right is," quoting City of Boerne v. Flores (1997).⁷ The two decisions rest on the same sentence and give it different weight.

Writing It in Congress: What Was Left Out

The House approved the final text on February 25, 1869 and the Senate the next day. Wikipedia reports the House vote as 144 to 44 with 35 not voting, nearly all on party lines: no Democrat voted yes and only three Republicans voted no, some of them because they thought the amendment did not go far enough. The Senate vote was 39 to 13 with 14 not voting. The same article's introduction, citing the Library of Congress, gives somewhat different House numbers (144 in favor, 39 opposed, seven abstentions). This lesson could not resolve the difference against the Congressional Globe, so check the roll call before quoting either set.⁸

The article also reports that Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts abstained because the amendment did not prohibit literacy tests and poll taxes.² The pattern in the House was similar: some members opposed the amendment because it did too little, others because it did too much.

What a conference committee removed

A House and Senate conference committee produced the final wording. Earlier versions that passed one chamber or the other had included language on holding office, and scholars disagree about why it was dropped.² The practical effects are two. The amendment protects voting, not officeholding, on its face. And it says nothing about the indirect barriers that Southern legislatures would soon use: poll taxes, literacy tests, residency rules and property tests.

Women and the amendment

The amendment named race and not sex. The Wikipedia article reports that the omission split the suffrage movement. The American Equal Rights Association divided into the National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which opposed the amendment, and the American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell, which supported it. The two groups did not reunite until the 1890s.² Women's suffrage came with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, and Idaho's part in that story is told in that module.

Ratification

Nevada acted first, on March 1, 1869. The New England states and most of the Midwest followed, as did Southern states under Reconstruction governments, North Carolina among them.² President Grant strongly endorsed the amendment and privately asked Nebraska's governor to call a special legislative session to speed that state's vote. Congress also tied ratification to readmission: Reconstruction bills passed in April and December 1869 required Virginia, Mississippi, Texas and Georgia to ratify before they regained representation, and all four did.²

Indiana and Ohio were close votes. New York ratified on April 14, 1869 and tried to rescind on January 5, 1870. Iowa's ratification on February 3, 1870, the date the National Archives gives as the ratification date, was the twenty-eighth. Nebraska (February 17) and Texas (February 18) followed, and Secretary of State Hamilton Fish certified the amendment on March 30, 1870 with twenty-nine ratifying states, one more than the twenty-eight required of thirty-seven states. That margin meant no court had to decide whether New York's rescission counted. New York re-ratified on March 30, 1970, a century to the day after the certification.⁹⁵

Seven states ratified long after the fact, each after first rejecting the amendment: New Jersey in 1871, Delaware in 1901, Oregon in 1959, California in 1962, Maryland in 1973, Kentucky in 1976 and Tennessee in 1997.⁹ Those votes had no legal effect. They put a state legislature's name to a rule that had been in force for generations.

The Supreme Court Reads It Narrowly: Reese, Cruikshank, Yarbrough

Congress used its Section 2 power quickly. The Enforcement Act of 1870 prohibited discrimination by state officials in voter registration on the basis of race, color or previous condition of servitude, set penalties for interfering with voting, gave federal courts power to enforce it, and authorized federal marshals and, if needed, the army. A second act in 1871 allowed federal oversight of elections in larger cities, and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 targeted conspiracies against civil rights.¹⁰

United States v. Reese (1876)

A Kentucky electoral official refused to register a Black voter for a municipal election and was indicted under the 1870 Act. The Supreme Court, through Chief Justice Waite, held the statute unenforceable as applied to restrictions that were not racial: two of its sections punished any interference with voting, whatever the reason, and so went beyond the Fifteenth Amendment. The Court's description of the amendment has been quoted ever since. It "does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one," but it "invested the citizens of the United States with a new constitutional right which is within the protecting power of Congress," a right of "exemption from discrimination in the exercise of the elective franchise on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."¹¹ The amendment forbids racial discrimination. It gives no one an affirmative claim to a ballot.

United States v. Cruikshank (1876)

The indictment in Cruikshank charged a conspiracy to injure and intimidate citizens of African descent in Louisiana, with counts that included hindering them from voting. The Court held the counts did not state an offense under the 1870 Act, partly because they did not allege that the defendants acted because of the victims' race. Chief Justice Waite put the point in a sentence that still gets quoted: "The right to vote in the States comes from the States; but the right of exemption from the prohibited discrimination comes from the United States."¹² The result was that a federal prosecutor had to plead and prove a racial motive. In a period of organized violence against Black voters, that was often impossible.

Ex parte Yarbrough (1884)

A different line of cases went the other way. In Yarbrough, men convicted of conspiring to intimidate a Black voter in a congressional election challenged the federal statute under which they were convicted. The Court sustained the convictions, holding that Congress has the power to protect the integrity of federal elections.¹³ The reporter's syllabus adds that although the Fifteenth Amendment gives no affirmative right to the Black citizen to vote, there are cases in which it "substantially confers that right" (that is the syllabus, not the Court's own words). The practical map for the next eighty years was this: Congress could protect federal elections under Article I and could reach racially motivated denials under the amendment, but it had few tools against the quieter methods that followed.

The Devices: Literacy Tests, Poll Taxes, Grandfather Clauses and White Primaries

From 1890 to 1910, according to Wikipedia's summary, Southern states adopted new constitutions and statutes with poll taxes and literacy tests that white voters were often excused from by grandfather clauses.⁸ The National Archives adds that literacy tests, grandfather clauses and other devices were written into the laws of former Confederate states in the early 1890s.⁵ The effects were fast. The National Museum of American History's exhibit reports that Louisiana had more than 130,000 registered Black voters in 1896 and only 1,342 by 1904.¹⁴

Williams v. Mississippi (1898)

The first challenge to the new devices to reach the Supreme Court came from Mississippi. The Court held that Mississippi's suffrage provisions "do not on their face discriminate between the races," and added that "it has not been shown that their actual administration was evil, only that evil was possible under them."¹⁵ The decision set a pattern: a rule that looked neutral would stand unless the challenger proved discriminatory administration, which is hard when the officials running the system are the ones discriminating.

Giles v. Harris (1903)

A Black Alabama resident sued on behalf of himself and others to compel the county registrars to enroll them under a state constitution that, he alleged, was built to exclude Black voters. Justice Holmes, for the Court, asked how a court could grant that relief without joining the scheme: "how can we make the court a party to the unlawful scheme by accepting it and adding another voter to its fraudulent lists?" He added that relief from "a great political wrong," if the allegations were true, "must be given by them or by the legislative and political department of the government of the United States."¹⁶ The Court gave no relief.

Guinn v. United States (1915)

Oklahoma's 1910 amendment required a literacy test of voters but exempted anyone entitled to vote on January 1, 1866, and their lineal descendants. The date came before the Fifteenth Amendment, so the exemption depended on conditions the amendment had been written to end. The Court held the grandfather clause void under the Fifteenth Amendment, and the companion case Myers v. Anderson allowed a damages suit against election officials who applied a similar Maryland provision.¹⁷ It was the first major Fifteenth Amendment victory, forty-five years after ratification.

Lane v. Wilson (1939)

Oklahoma answered Guinn with a new registration law. People who had voted in 1914 under the grandfather clause were registered automatically. Everyone else had a window of not more than twelve days to register or be barred for good. Justice Frankfurter wrote for the Court that the Fifteenth Amendment "nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination," and held the scheme void.¹⁸

Smith v. Allwright (1944)

For decades the Democratic Party in Texas and elsewhere kept Black voters out of its primaries, on the argument that a party is a private association. In Smith v. Allwright the Court held that excluding Black citizens from a primary that selects nominees for a general election was state action in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment, and overruled Grovey v. Townsend. Justice Roberts dissented.¹⁹

Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960)

Alabama redrew the boundary of Tuskegee from a square into what the Court called an "uncouth twenty-eight-sided figure." The complaint alleged that the new boundary would remove all but four or five of the city's 400 Black voters without removing a single white voter. The Court held that a state's ordinary power over municipal boundaries could not be used to deny the vote on account of race.²⁰

The Voting Rights Act of 1965

The Justice Department's history of the Act begins with Selma. On March 7, 1965, state troopers attacked peaceful marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and Congress and the President moved to overcome resistance to a strong voting rights law. President Johnson told Congress on March 15 that he wanted legislation "which will make it impossible to thwart the 15th Amendment." The Act was signed on August 6, 1965.²¹²²

Why Congress changed tools

Congress had already passed civil rights acts in 1957, 1960 and 1964 that relied on lawsuits. The Supreme Court said in South Carolina v. Katzenbach that these laws "have done little to cure the problem of voting discrimination," and cited the Attorney General's estimates for three states.⁶ Black registration in Alabama rose only from 14.2% to 19.4% between 1958 and 1964. In Louisiana it went from 31.7% to 31.8% between 1956 and 1965, and in Mississippi from 4.4% to 6.4% between 1954 and 1964. In each state white registration ran roughly fifty points higher or more.

The main parts

• Section 2 bans voting practices that deny or abridge the vote on account of race or color. It applies everywhere and does not expire.
• Section 4 set a formula for which states and counties were "covered": a test or device in use on November 1, 1964, and fewer than 50 percent of voting-age people registered or voting.²³
• Section 5 required covered jurisdictions to get federal approval ("preclearance") before changing a voting rule.
• The Attorney General could send federal examiners to review qualifications and, where examiners served, observers to the polls. The Department's history says the Act also suspended literacy tests in the covered areas.²¹

South Carolina challenged the law as an invasion of state power. In March 1966 the Court upheld it. The Court noted the House vote of 328 to 74 and the Senate vote of 79 to 18, and described the problem Congress faced as "unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution."⁶ According to the National Archives, Congress extended the Act in 1970, 1975 and 1982.⁵

Section 2 in the statute's own words

(a) No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color ... (b) A violation of subsection (a) is established if, based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a class of citizens protected by subsection (a) in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.

52 U.S.C. sec. 10301(a), (b)²⁴

Intent or effects: Mobile v. Bolden and the 1982 amendment

In City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980) a plurality of four Justices, in an opinion by Justice Stewart, held that a claim under the Fifteenth Amendment, or under the old text of Section 2, required proof that the challenged system was adopted or maintained for a discriminatory purpose. In 1982 Congress amended Section 2 so that a violation could be shown by results under the "totality of circumstances," with no need to prove purpose. The key word in the new text is "results." The Court applied the amended text in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986).²⁵²⁴

Two standards followed. The Constitution, as the Court reads it, requires intent. The statute, as Congress amended it, has a results test. For dilution claims, Gingles asks three questions: whether the minority group is "sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district," whether it is politically cohesive, and whether whites vote sufficiently as a bloc usually to defeat its preferred candidate.²⁶ Callais reopened the relationship between the two standards.

The Modern Cases: Shelby County, Brnovich, Milligan and Callais

Shelby County v. Holder (2013)

Chief Justice Roberts wrote for a 5 to 4 majority. The Court held that "Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional; its formula can no longer be used as a basis for subjecting jurisdictions to preclearance." The formula, the Court said, rested on decades-old data, and the Court closed with: "Our country has changed, and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions."²⁷ Justice Ginsburg, dissenting for four, wrote that throwing out preclearance when it was working was "like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."²⁸ Section 5 stays in the statute, but with no coverage formula it applies to no one unless Congress writes a new formula. This lesson found no new formula as of October 2026.

Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021)

Arizona threw out ballots cast in the wrong precinct and restricted who could collect ballots under a law known as HB 2023. In an opinion by Justice Alito, the Court held 6 to 3 that neither rule violated Section 2 and that HB 2023 was not enacted with a racially discriminatory purpose. The Court declined to announce a single test for time, place or manner rules and instead identified five guideposts.²⁹³⁰

Allen v. Milligan (2023)

A three-judge district court had preliminarily enjoined Alabama's HB1 congressional map after finding the plaintiffs likely to show a Section 2 violation. The Court affirmed, 5 to 4, in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, applying the Gingles framework it had used for 37 years.³¹

Louisiana v. Callais (April 29, 2026)

The background is the Louisiana map. In 2022 a federal judge held in Robinson v. Ardoin that the state's congressional map likely violated Section 2 because it lacked an additional majority-Black district. Louisiana then drew a new map, SB8, with that district, and non-Black voters challenged SB8 as a racial gerrymander. A three-judge court held that SB8 violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court heard argument on October 15, 2025, in a case it had briefed and argued the term before.³²

Justice Alito wrote for six Justices that SB8 was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Fourteenth Amendment, because Section 2 did not require Louisiana to create the additional majority-minority district and so no compelling interest justified drawing the map with race in mind.³³ To reach that result the majority read Section 2 narrowly. Properly interpreted, it wrote, Section 2 "imposes liability only when circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred," and the majority tied that reading to the Fifteenth Amendment's reach.⁷ The Court did not strike Section 2 down. It also kept Gingles, but "updated" it. According to the syllabus, illustrative maps may not use race and must meet all of the State's legitimate districting goals, expert analyses must control for party, and the totality-of-circumstances inquiry gives its weight to present-day intentional discrimination.³³

The dissent and the concurrence read the same history in opposite directions. Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, joined the opinion in full and wrote that the Court "should never have interpreted" Section 2 to give racial groups "an entitlement to roughly proportional representation."³⁴ Justice Kagan, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, dissented. Her opinion argues that in 1982 Congress chose the effects test of White over the purpose test of Bolden, and that a rule letting a state defeat a claim by pointing to a non-racial goal would defeat nearly every claim.³⁵ The Court ordered its judgment to issue forthwith on May 4, 2026.³⁶

Several questions remain open. Whether private plaintiffs may sue under Section 2 at all has been contested in the Eighth Circuit, and this lesson could not confirm where that question stands in October 2026. How lower courts will apply the "strong inference" standard to vote-denial and ballot-access claims, as opposed to districting claims, was not settled by any decision this lesson found. And Congress may legislate again under its Section 2 power, within the limits Boerne sets. Two secondary accounts this lesson read, a news commentary and Wikipedia's entry on the case, described the holding differently from the slip opinion. The slip opinion is the source for everything above.

What the Amendment Does Not Do

• It does not guarantee a right to vote. The Court said so in Reese and again in Cruikshank.¹¹¹² Citizenship, age, residence and (in most states) felony status are set by state law.
• It prohibits government action and does not reach private conduct by itself. It speaks to "the United States or any State."⁴ In Smith v. Allwright the question was state action in the primary.¹⁹
• It names only race, color and previous servitude. But ancestry can stand in for race. In Rice v. Cayetano (2000) the Court, 7 to 2, struck down a Hawaii rule that let only descendants of the peoples inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands in 1778 vote for certain state trustees, writing that "Ancestry can be a proxy for race."³⁷
• Partisan advantage is a separate matter. The Callais majority wrote that Section 2 does not intrude on a state's prerogative to draw districts on nonracial factors, "including to achieve partisan advantage."³⁵

Who Counted: Native Americans and the Fifteenth Amendment

The Fourteenth Amendment excluded "Indians not taxed" from the apportionment count. In Elk v. Wilkins (1884) the Court held that an Indian born a member of a tribe that still existed, who had voluntarily left it and settled among white citizens of Nebraska but had not been naturalized or taxed or recognized as a citizen, was not a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment, and so could not claim the vote.³⁸ Congress made Native Americans citizens by the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.³⁹ Citizenship did not end the exclusions, because states kept their own voting rules. In Idaho, the Solicitor of the Interior wrote on January 26, 1938 that Idaho laws excluding "Indians not taxed," and Indians keeping tribal relations, from voting violated the Fifteenth Amendment.⁴⁰ A local news summary reports that Idaho voters approved a constitutional amendment on the subject in 1950 by about 73 percent, and the Secretary of State's table lists Amendment No. 57, which changed Art. VI, sec. 3, as ratified on November 7, 1950.³⁹⁴¹

This lesson did not read the pre-1950 text of section 3 and does not quote it. The link among the 1938 opinion, the 1950 vote and amendment No. 57 comes from the sources cited and has not been confirmed from the old constitutional text.

Common Misreadings

Questions People Ask

Did Idaho vote on the Fifteenth Amendment?

No. Idaho was a territory in 1869 and 1870, and territories do not ratify amendments. It entered the Union on July 3, 1890.³

Does the amendment protect noncitizens?

No. By its terms it protects "citizens of the United States."⁴ Idaho's constitution adds that no person who is not a citizen "shall be a qualified elector in any election held within the state of Idaho."⁴²

Is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act still in force after Callais?

Yes. The Court did not strike it down. It read Section 2 to impose liability "only when circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred," and it updated the Gingles framework.⁷³³

Landmark Cases

Each case below was checked against the opinion text where a link appears in the footnotes. Supporting cases appear in the sections above.

The Idaho Connection

A territory, not a state

Idaho did not ratify the Fifteenth Amendment. It was a territory and became the 43rd state on July 3, 1890.³ The Idaho story is about how the amendment's rule played out in territorial and state law.

John West and the 1870 sheriff's race

A Lewiston Tribune account says John West was Idaho's first Black voter, in an 1870 Ada County sheriff election decided 419 to 418.⁴³ This lesson did not locate the election records, so the details stay attributed to the newspaper.

The Idaho test oath and Davis v. Beason

A different exclusion hit a religious group. In 1884 the territorial legislature passed a test oath that barred polygamists, and people who taught or encouraged polygamy, from voting and holding office. The University of Idaho Library describes the political aim as breaking the power of Latter-day Saint voters in southern Idaho.⁴⁴ The Supreme Court upheld the law in Davis v. Beason (decided February 3, 1890), an appeal from the Third Judicial District Court of the Territory of Idaho.⁴⁵ The grounds were religion and conduct and not race, so it is not a Fifteenth Amendment case. It belongs in this lesson because it shows who could and could not vote in Idaho Territory, and because the same library page says a similar clause stayed in the state constitution until 1982. This lesson could not find which amendment removed it.⁴⁴

Elmore County and the Voting Rights Act

Idaho as a whole was never a covered state under the Voting Rights Act, but one Idaho county was. The Court's opinion in South Carolina v. Katzenbach records that "one county in Idaho" was added to the coverage list on November 19, 1965 (30 Fed. Reg. 14505), and that this county was among the covered jurisdictions that asked the D.C. district court for a declaratory judgment ending coverage. The suit was Elmore County v. United States, Civ. Act. 320-66.⁴⁶ Under the 1965 formula, coverage meant that the Attorney General had determined the county maintained a "test or device" on November 1, 1964, and the Census Director had determined that fewer than 50 percent of its voting-age residents were registered then or voted in the November 1964 presidential election.²³ The Justice Department's bailout list shows two dates for Elmore County, September 22, 1966 and July 31, 1984, without explaining them on the page this lesson read.²³

In 1970 Congress added a second prong to the formula, keyed to November 1968, and the Department's account says the result was partial coverage of ten states including Idaho. Five of those states, Idaho among them, filed successful bailout suits. The 1975 language-minority prong did not list Idaho among the states it covered.²³ The lesson did not identify which Idaho counties were covered in 1970 or when each coverage ended.

Native American voting in Idaho

See the section above on the 1938 Solicitor's opinion and the 1950 amendment.⁴⁰⁴¹

The Idaho Constitution today

Article VI, section 2 makes "every male or female citizen of the United States, eighteen years old," who meets residency and registration rules a qualified elector.⁴² Article I, section 2 says government "is instituted for their equal protection and benefit," meaning the people's.⁴⁷ Section 4 of Article VI lets the legislature add qualifications for suffrage but forbids it to annul the article's own provisions.⁴¹

Not confirmed: this lesson found no Idaho Supreme Court decision applying the Fifteenth Amendment and did not research Idaho's current redistricting litigation or procedure.

Where This Shows Up for Officials, Reporters and Citizens

The county clerk and the registration rule

A clerk in an invented county is asked by an advocacy group why registration drives at the community college draw more rejections than drives at the grange hall. Each rejection can have a legitimate cause (no proof of residency, a missing signature). The legal question is whether any practice applies differently by race. Section 2 reaches practices that "result" in denial or abridgement on account of race, as Brnovich reads it, and the Fifteenth Amendment reaches purposeful discrimination. A clerk who keeps dated, uniform records of why each application was rejected can answer both.²⁴²⁹

The county commission and a new district map

A county commission redraws its commissioner districts after a census. After Callais, a challenger who claims the map dilutes minority votes under Section 2 will have to meet the updated Gingles framework and show circumstances that support a strong inference of intentional discrimination. A challenger who claims the commission used race too heavily can bring an Equal Protection claim, as the plaintiffs did in Callais. A commission staff member who knows both claims exist can ask which of them the map's documentation will have to answer.³³⁷

The reporter and the vote count

A reporter covering a ruling on a voting rule should ask which law the plaintiffs invoked: the Fifteenth Amendment, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, or state law. They carry different standards. A story that says a court "struck down the Voting Rights Act" almost certainly means a different thing, since after Shelby County the formula in Section 4 is the part that fell, and Section 2 remains.²⁷⁷ For the 2026 decision, read the slip opinion and not summaries of it, because secondary accounts this lesson checked described the holding differently from the opinion.³³

The resident checking whether a rule is race-neutral

A resident reading a proposed polling-place consolidation can ask the five Brnovich questions in order: how big the burden is, whether it departs from the practice in place in 1982, who bears any disparity, what other voting options the system offers, and how strong the state's reason is.³⁰ Idaho's residency rule for voters is set in Idaho Code section 34-402 under the authority of Art. VI, sec. 2.⁴²

The tribal liaison and the ballot

A tribal government liaison in an invented Idaho county hears that members living far from the county seat cannot reach the polls. The 1938 Solicitor's opinion and the 1950 amendment show that Native American voting in Idaho has an exclusion history that was addressed by amendment and not only by litigation. The current question is practical: what opportunities the county's whole system offers, including how and where ballots can be cast.⁴⁰⁴¹³⁰

Related Modules

Related lessons: The Civil War Amendments (Module 10, the overview of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth); The Fourteenth Amendment (citizenship, equal protection and Section 5); Voting and the Later Amendments (Module 11); The Nineteenth Amendment (women's suffrage and Idaho's 1896 vote); The Twenty-fourth Amendment (poll taxes); The Twenty-sixth Amendment (the voting age); Amending the Constitution (how the amendment was ratified); Federalism and the States; and Article I: Congress (the Elections Clause that Yarbrough relied on).

Sources & Further Reading

Primary Sources

• National Archives: Amendments 11-27 (text of the Fifteenth Amendment)
• National Archives: 15th Amendment, with enrolled resolution transcript
• South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301 (1966), govinfo
• United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876), govinfo
• Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347 (1915), govinfo
• Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013), govinfo
• Louisiana v. Callais (April 29, 2026), slip opinion
• DOJ: History of Federal Voting Rights Laws
• DOJ: Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, with bailout list

Secondary Sources and Further Reading

• Wikipedia: Fifteenth Amendment (secondary; check figures)
• Wikipedia: Enforcement Acts
• SCOTUSblog: Court gives immediate effect to VRA decision (May 6, 2026)
• CHNM: Laurel Grove School exhibit item (Louisiana registration)

Idaho Law and Records

• Idaho Constitution with amendment table (Secretary of State)
• Idaho Constitution art. VI, sec. 2
• Idaho Code sec. 34-402
• U.S. Senate: Idaho timeline
• University of Idaho Library: Idaho Test Oath
• Solicitor of the Interior opinion, January 26, 1938
• Lewiston Tribune: John West, Idaho's first Black voter (newspaper account)
• City Cast Boise: American Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 (secondary)

Related Training Modules

• Module 10: The Civil War Amendments
• The Fourteenth Amendment
• The Nineteenth Amendment
• The Twenty-fourth Amendment
• The Twenty-sixth Amendment

Footnotes

1. Fourteenth Amendment, Section 2, as transcribed at archives.gov: representation is reduced when the vote is "denied to any of the male inhabitants" who are "twenty-one years of age" and citizens "or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime."
2. Same Wikipedia article (Fifteenth Amendment), sections on the congressional debate and ratification. The state-by-state dates and the New York rescission are as stated there; confirm against the Department of State proclamation and the state journals before quoting a date.
3. U.S. Senate, Idaho timeline (Idaho became the 43rd state on July 3, 1890).
4. U.S. National Archives, The Constitution: Amendments 11-27 (transcription of Amendment XV, with the heading "Passed by Congress February 26, 1869. Ratified February 3, 1870"). The transcription ends Section 1 with a double hyphen after "servitude"; the enrolled resolution is reproduced in the National Archives milestone page cited next. The period at the end of Section 1 in the printed Constitution is the usual modern rendering.
5. U.S. National Archives, 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Voting Rights (1870), with a transcript of the House Joint Resolution proposing the amendment (Fortieth Congress, third session, begun December 7, 1868).
6. South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301 (decided March 7, 1966), official text (govinfo). House vote 328 to 74 and Senate vote 79 to 18 at 309; "unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution" at 309; Attorney General estimates of Black registration in Alabama (14.2% to 19.4%, 1958 to 1964), Louisiana (31.7% to 31.8%, 1956 to 1965) and Mississippi (4.4% to 6.4%, 1954 to 1964) are in the Court's discussion of the pre-1965 laws.
7. Louisiana v. Callais, syllabus, part (a) (slip opinion pp. 22 to 26): "When §2 of the Act is properly interpreted, it imposes liability only when circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred." The opinion ties that reading to South Carolina v. Katzenbach and City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507, 519 (1997). Source: the slip opinion linked in the previous note.
8. Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (Wikipedia, secondary source, read October 2026). The article gives the House vote as 144 to 44 with 35 not voting and the Senate vote as 39 to 13 with 14 not voting. Its introduction, citing the Library of Congress, gives different counts (144 Republicans in favor, 39 no votes, seven abstentions in the House). This lesson could not reconcile the two sets of figures against the Congressional Globe and therefore reports the body figures and flags the variance.
9. Fifteenth Amendment (Wikipedia), list of ratification dates: Nevada March 1, 1869 first; Iowa February 3, 1870 twenty-eighth; Nebraska February 17 and Texas February 18, 1870 included in the March 30, 1870 certification by Secretary of State Hamilton Fish; the article says the total of twenty-nine ratifying states was one more than the twenty-eight required of thirty-seven states. Each of the seven states that ratified later had first rejected or, in New York's case, rescinded.
10. Enforcement Acts (Wikipedia, secondary source). The description of the 1870 and 1871 acts and of the 1964 use of the 1870 act in the Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman prosecution comes from this page.
11. United States v. Reese, 92 U.S. 214 (1876). The govinfo file for this case was truncated when this lesson fetched it, so the Court's words are taken from how a later opinion quotes it: City of Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U.S. 55, 62 (1980), official text (govinfo), quoting Reese, 92 U.S. at 217-218. The facts (a Kentucky electoral official refused to register an African American voter for a municipal election and was indicted under the Enforcement Act of 1870; Chief Justice Waite wrote for the majority) are from Wikipedia (secondary source).
12. United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, 548, 555-556 (1876), official text (govinfo) (Waite, C.J.). The indictment charged a conspiracy to injure and intimidate "citizens of the United States, of African descent" in Louisiana, under the Enforcement Act of May 31, 1870, 16 Stat. 141. The quoted sentence is at 555-556: "The right to vote in the States comes from the States; but the right of exemption from the prohibited discrimination comes from the United States."
13. Ex parte Yarbrough, 110 U.S. 651 (decided March 3, 1884), official text (govinfo).
14. Smithsonian National Museum of American History exhibit text as quoted by the Center for History and New Media, Laurel Grove School exhibit item: "In Louisiana, where more than 130,000 black voters had been registered in 1896, the number had plummeted to 1,342 by 1904."
15. Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (decided April 25, 1898), official text (govinfo): "it has not been shown that their actual administration was evil, only that evil was possible under them."
16. Giles v. Harris, 189 U.S. 475 (decided April 27, 1903), official text (govinfo). The quoted passage says relief from "a great political wrong" must be given by the political departments, not by the Court.
17. Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347 (decided June 21, 1915), official text (govinfo). The Oklahoma clause exempted from the literacy test anyone entitled to vote on January 1, 1866, and their lineal descendants. The companion damages case is Myers v. Anderson, 238 U.S. 368 (1915).
18. Lane v. Wilson, 307 U.S. 268 (decided May 22, 1939), official text (govinfo) (Frankfurter, J.; Justice Douglas took no part). The syllabus describes the 1916 Oklahoma scheme: those who had voted in 1914 under the grandfather clause were registered automatically, while others "would remain forever disfranchised unless they applied for registration during the limited period of not more than 12 days." The opinion's holding is that the scheme is repugnant to the Fifteenth Amendment.
19. Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (decided April 3, 1944), official text (govinfo). The syllabus states the holding: the exclusion of Black citizens from a party primary that selects nominees for a general election "was State action in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment," and Grovey v. Townsend, 295 U.S. 45, was overruled. Justice Roberts dissented.
20. Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U.S. 339 (decided November 14, 1960), official text (govinfo). The complaint alleged that the act altered Tuskegee from a square to an irregular 28-sided figure that would remove all but four or five of its 400 Black voters without removing any white voter. The Court called the result an "uncouth twenty-eight-sided figure."
21. U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, History of Federal Voting Rights Laws (Voting Rights Act signed August 6, 1965; Selma, March 7, 1965).
22. National Archives milestone page (cited above) quoting President Johnson's message of March 15, 1965: legislation "which will make it impossible to thwart the 15th Amendment." archives.gov.
23. U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act: the 1965 formula (a "test or device" maintained on November 1, 1964, and fewer than 50 percent of voting-age persons registered on that date or voting in the November 1964 presidential election); counties in Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho and North Carolina covered in 1965; the 1970 second prong (November 1968) resulting in partial coverage of ten states including Idaho, five of which, Idaho among them, "filed successful bailout lawsuits"; the 1975 language-minority prong; and the bailout list showing "Elmore County, Idaho - September 22, 1966; July 31, 1984."
24. 52 U.S.C. sec. 10301, as quoted in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, 594 U.S. 647, 666-667 (2021), supremecourt.gov. The Court also notes that subsection (a) now reaches practices that "result" in denial or abridgement and omits the phrase "to deny or abridge the right ... to vote on account of race or color" that the Bolden plurality had read to require proof of discriminatory intent.
25. City of Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U.S. 55 (decided April 22, 1980), official text (govinfo). The plurality required proof of discriminatory purpose; Congress amended Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 (described in Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30 (1986), official text (govinfo)).
26. Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30, 50-51 (1986) (Brennan, J.; the case came from North Carolina), official text (govinfo): the minority group must show it "is sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district," that it is politically cohesive, and that whites vote sufficiently as a bloc usually to defeat its preferred candidate.
27. Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (decided June 25, 2013), official text (govinfo) (Roberts, C.J., joined by Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito; Ginsburg, J., dissenting, joined by Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan). Held: Section 4 is unconstitutional and its formula "can no longer be used as a basis for subjecting jurisdictions to preclearance." The Court closed with "Our country has changed."
28. Shelby County, 570 U.S. at 590 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting): "Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." official text (govinfo). Page number as printed in the U.S. Reports; confirm before quoting.
29. Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, 594 U.S. 647 (decided July 1, 2021), slip opinion and the Court's bound text (supremecourt.gov). Held: Arizona's out-of-precinct policy and HB 2023 do not violate Section 2, and HB 2023 was not enacted with a racially discriminatory purpose. The Court declined to announce a single test and identified "guideposts."
30. Brnovich, 594 U.S. at 668-672 (syllabus summary of the Court's guideposts): the size of the burden; the degree to which a rule departs from what was standard practice when Section 2 was amended in 1982; the size of any disparities in impact; the opportunities provided by the State's entire system of voting; and the strength of the state interests served.
31. Allen v. Milligan, 599 U.S. 1 (decided June 8, 2023), opinion (supremecourt.gov). The three-judge district court preliminarily enjoined Alabama from using its HB1 congressional map after concluding that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their Section 2 claim; the Court affirmed, applying Gingles. Chief Justice Roberts wrote, 5 to 4, with Justice Kavanaugh joining in part.
32. Louisiana v. Callais, syllabus (argued October 15, 2025, decided April 29, 2026): a federal judge held in Robinson v. Ardoin (M.D. La. 2022) that Louisiana's 2022 congressional map likely violated Section 2 for lack of an additional majority-Black district; Louisiana then drew SB8 with such a district; a three-judge court in Callais v. Landry, 732 F. Supp. 3d 574 (W.D. La.), held SB8 violated the Equal Protection Clause; the Court notes the parties "originally briefed and argued this suit last Term." Slip opinion.
33. Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U.S. ___ (decided April 29, 2026), slip opinion (supremecourt.gov). Alito, J., for the Court, joined by Roberts, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett; Thomas, J., concurring, joined by Gorsuch; Kagan, J., dissenting, joined by Sotomayor and Jackson. The syllabus states the holding: "Because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, no compelling interest justified the State's use of race in creating SB8, and that map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander." Pin pages are to the slip opinion and will change in the bound volume.
34. Louisiana v. Callais, Thomas, J., concurring (joined by Gorsuch, J.), slip op. at 1: the Court "should never have interpreted" Section 2 "to effectively give racial groups 'an entitlement to roughly proportional representation,'" quoting Justice O'Connor in Gingles. Slip opinion.
35. Louisiana v. Callais, syllabus, part (a): properly read, Section 2 "does not intrude on States' prerogative to draw districts based on nonracial factors, including to achieve partisan advantage." Slip opinion linked above. The dissent argues that Congress chose an effects test over a purpose test when it amended Section 2 in 1982 and that a state's non-race-based justification should not defeat a claim; see Kagan, J., dissenting.
36. Amy Howe, Court gives immediate effect to Voting Rights Act decision, SCOTUSblog (May 6, 2026), reporting the Court's order of May 4, 2026 that the judgment issue at once. Wikipedia and at least one news commentary this lesson read described the Callais holding differently from the slip opinion; where they differ, this lesson follows the opinion.
37. Rice v. Cayetano, 528 U.S. 495 (decided February 23, 2000), official text (govinfo) (Kennedy, J., for a 7 to 2 Court): "Ancestry can be a proxy for race."
38. Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (decided November 3, 1884), official text (govinfo).
39. City Cast Boise, History of the American Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 (secondary source), reporting that Idaho voters approved a 1950 constitutional amendment on Native American voting, with 73% in favor.
40. Solicitor of the Interior, opinion of January 26, 1938, concluding that Idaho laws excluding Indians not taxed, and Indians maintaining tribal relations, from voting conflict with the Fifteenth Amendment, as reproduced at Opinions of the Solicitor, University of Oklahoma Law Center.
41. Idaho Secretary of State, Idaho Constitution (current through the November 5, 2024 election), including the table of amendments: Amendment No. 57, Art. VI, sec. 3, proposed 1949 (S.L. p. 597, H.J.R. 2), ratified November 7, 1950. Current Art. VI, sec. 3 disqualifies persons convicted of a felony who have not been restored to citizenship rights, or who are confined in prison on conviction. This lesson did not read the pre-1950 text of section 3.
42. Idaho Constitution, art. VI, sec. 2: "Every male or female citizen of the United States, eighteen years old, who has resided in this state, and in the county where he or she offers to vote for the period provided by law, if registered as provided by law, is a qualified elector." Idaho Legislature. Residency length is set by statute: Idaho Code sec. 34-402, Idaho Legislature.
43. Lewiston Morning Tribune, Boise to honor John West, Idaho's first Black voter. This is a newspaper account of an 1870 Ada County sheriff election decided 419 to 418. This lesson did not locate the territorial election records, so treat the details as the newspaper's account.
44. University of Idaho Library, Idaho Test Oath, Idaho Harvester (written 1996). The library page says the state constitution carried a similar clause, that the 1893 legislature removed the restriction against Mormon voters, and that "the constitutional provision was not removed until 1982." This lesson could not match that statement to a specific numbered amendment in the Secretary of State's table.
45. Davis v. Beason, 133 U.S. 333 (argued December 9 and 10, 1889; decided February 3, 1890), appeal from the Third Judicial District Court of the Territory of Idaho, official text (govinfo). The Court upheld section 501 of the Revised Statutes of Idaho, which barred bigamists, polygamists and those who taught, advised or encouraged either from voting and from office, and section 504, the oath.
46. South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. at 318-320 and nn.25, 29, official text (govinfo): "one county in Idaho" was added to the list of covered areas on November 19, 1965 (30 Fed. Reg. 14505), and the Court lists Elmore County v. United States, Civ. Act. 320-66, among the suits for a declaratory judgment ending coverage.
47. Idaho Constitution, art. I, sec. 2, "Political power inherent in the people" (government "is instituted for their equal protection and benefit"): Idaho Legislature.