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Constitutional Law Keyed to Choper
Dunn v. Blumstein
Citation:
405 U.S. 330 (1972)Facts
James Blumstein moved to Nashville, Tennessee on June 12, 1970, to begin employment as an assistant professor of law at Vanderbilt University. On July 1, 1970, he attempted to register to vote in the upcoming August and November elections but was denied registration by the county registrar. The denial was based on Tennessee law, which required that voters be residents of the state for one year and residents of the county for three months before they could register to vote. Blumstein filed a class action lawsuit challenging these durational residence requirements as violations of the Equal Protection Clause. Tennessee defended its requirements on two grounds: to ensure ballot box purity by preventing fraud through colonization and to ensure knowledgeable voters who had become members of the community. The three-judge district court ruled in Blumstein’s favor, finding that the durational residence requirements impermissibly interfered with the right to vote and created a suspect classification penalizing recent interstate movement.
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