Oregon v. Mitchell

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Oregon v. Mitchell

Supreme Court of the United States

Argued October 20, 1970
Decided December 21, 1970


Full case name:	Oregon v. Mitchell, Attorney General

Citations:	400 U.S. 112; 91 S. Ct. 260; 27 L. Ed. 2d 272; 1970 U.S. LEXIS 1

Holding

Congress may set requirements for voting in federal elections, but is prohibited from setting requirements in state and local elections.

Court membership

Chief Justice: Warren E. Burger
Associate Justices: Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, John Marshall Harlan II, William J. Brennan, Potter Stewart, Byron White, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun

Case opinions

Majority by: Black
Concurrence/dissent by: Douglas
Concurrence/dissent by: Harlan
Concurrence/dissent by: Brennan, White, Marshall
Concurrence/dissent by: Stewart
Joined by: Burger, Blackmun

Laws applied

Necessary and Proper Clause, U.S. Const. art. I § 2 and 4, art. II § 1, Enforcement Clauses of the 14th and 15th Amendments, Voting Rights Act

Superseded by

U.S. Const. amend. XXVI

Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112 (1970),^[1] was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that states could set their own age limits for state elections.

Plaintiff "Oregon" was the U.S. state of that name. Defendant "Mitchell" was John Mitchell in his role as United States Attorney General. Congress had passed an act requiring all states to register citizens between the ages of 18 and 21 as voters. Oregon did not desire to lower its voting age to 18, and filed suit on the grounds that the act was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court found largely for Oregon, in that it found that while Congress could set requirements for voting in federal elections that it did not have the power to set the voting age for state elections.

[edit] Enforcement

Obviously, enforcement of this ruling would have proven to be problematic. States not lowering the voting age to 18 would have had to provide special federal-election only ballots to citizens between 18 and 21 voting in federal elections. States would have to maintain two sets of voting registries, one for those between 18 and 21 and another for those over 21.

This question became moot with the ratification of the Twenty-sixth Amendment the next year, which empowered Congress to legislate the lowering of the voting age to 18 for all elections in all states.