by Most expansions of voting rights in the United States come from constitutional amendments and actions by Congress, not the courts. In fact, in Bush vs. GoreTo give a relatively recent example, the Supreme Court reiterated that the Constitution does not guarantee citizens the right to vote for the president and confirmed that states can regain the power to directly appoint presidential electors in future elections.
Some people mistakenly think of the Supreme Court as a broad protector of voting rights, expanding them far beyond the text of the Constitution. Let us first consider the case of Sgt. Herbert N. Carrington, one of the lucky few whose right to vote was protected by the court. In 1946 he enlisted in the army at age 18 in his home state of Alabama. When he was transferred in 1962 to White Sands, New Mexico, he moved with his family to nearby El Paso, Texas. However, when he attempted to register to vote in the Texas Republican Party primary, he was shocked to learn that he was ineligible. The state Constitution prohibited military members who were not Texas residents from voting there before joining the service.
Mr. Carrington filed suit against the state directly to the Texas Supreme Court in 1964, arguing, among other things, that his disenfranchisement violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, a provision that prohibited states from denying “to any person within their jurisdiction equal protection.” of the laws.” When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Texas defended its Constitution, maintaining that it had “a legitimate interest in immunizing its elections against the concentrated voting of military personnel, whose collective voice can overwhelm a small local civilian community.”
The Supreme Court disagreed and struck down the Texas provision in the 1965 case. Carrington against rash. The right to vote, the court wrote in a key part of its 7-1 opinion, “cannot be constitutionally eliminated for fear of the political opinions of a particular group of bona fide residents.” Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting alone, argued that the equal protection clause “was not intended to affect state election issues.”
It’s hard to overstate how unusual it was for Carrington to get his disenfranchisement overturned by the Supreme Court. Her lawsuit came during the only period in the Supreme Court’s 235-year history in which she was receptive to broad constitutional claims for voting rights. The court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, saw a broad expansion of voting rights in the 1960s, thanks largely to its broad interpretation of the equal protection clause.
