Supreme Court of the United States
Rice v. Cayetano
February 23, 2000528 U.S. 495
Summary
The Court held that Hawaii's ancestry-based restriction on voting for Office of Hawaiian Affairs trustees is a racial qualification that violates the Fifteenth Amendment. Because OHA is a state agency and its elections are state elections, neither the state-trust rationale nor the analogy to tribal self-government permits Hawaii to exclude citizens from voting based on ancestry. Justice Breyer concurred in the result on narrower grounds, while Justices Stevens and Ginsburg dissented and would have upheld the voting scheme under federal Indian-affairs principles.