The Materiality Provision in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits states from denying the right to vote over paperwork errors or omissions that are immaterial to a voter’s qualifications to vote. In 2021, Texas passed an omnibus election law, known as S.B. 1, that requires voters applying for an absentee ballot to include an ID number on the application, and, upon receiving the absentee ballot materials, to include an ID number on the absentee ballot’s envelope. If a voter makes an error in her ID number on these materials, or fails to include it altogether, Texas law mandates that her application and ballot be rejected.

The District Court for the Western District of Texas held that these provisions of S.B. 1 violated the Materiality Provision. On appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Texas and Intervenors are arguing that the Materiality Provision only applies to voter registration materials and does not cover paperwork required to vote by mail.

In August 2024, CAC filed an amicus brief in support of those challenging S.B. 1. As the text and history of the Civil Rights Act make clear, the Materiality Provision unambiguously includes papers related to voting by mail. And as the text and history of the Fifteenth Amendment make clear, Congress had the authority to enact the Provision.

The Fifteenth Amendment gives Congress sweeping power to enforce the Amendment’s ban on racial discrimination in voting. The Fifteenth Amendment provides 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.” To make the Fifteenth Amendment’s guarantee a reality, the Framers explicitly provided that “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Its authors explained that this Enforcement Clause gives Congress a broad “affirmative power” to secure the right to vote.

Congress used its Fifteenth Amendment enforcement power to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and prohibit arbitrary denials of the right to vote. Despite the Fifteenth Amendment’s broad prohibition of racial discrimination in voting, states devised novel procedures to prevent Black citizens from voting. Congress sought to strengthen federal civil rights protections with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and its authors were specifically concerned about arbitrary practices that disenfranchised voters with “irrelevantly strict” requirements. As one Congressman succinctly put it, “the failure to insert a period or a comma may not be used to” disenfranchise Black voters.

The Materiality Provision’s plain text prohibits the denial of the “right to vote” due to an “error or omission” on “any record or paper” required to “cast[] a ballot.” The statutory definition of “vote” makes clear that the Provision encompasses any paperwork necessary for a voter to make her “vote effective.” The broad language in this definition includes all stages of voting, including registration, casting a ballot, and having that ballot counted. Therefore, the plain text of the provision clearly encompasses the absentee ballot papers at issue in this case. Texas’s and Intervenors’ arguments that the Materiality Provision’s inclusion of vote-by-mail paperwork threatens the Provision’s constitutionality under the Fifteenth Amendment are meritless.

The Fifth Circuit should affirm the District Court’s decision, rejecting Texas’ unlawful attempt to disenfranchise voters.