522
Opinion of the Court
lidity of the underlying administrative structure and trusts, without intimating any opinion on that point. Nonetheless, the elections for OHA trustee are elections of the State, not of a separate quasi sovereign, and they are elections to which the Fifteenth Amendment applies. To extend Mancari to this context would be to permit a State, by racial classification, to fence out whole classes of its citizens from decision-making in critical state affairs. The Fifteenth Amendment forbids this result.
B
Hawaii further contends that the limited voting franchise is sustainable under a series of cases holding that the rule of one person, one vote does not pertain to certain special purpose districts such as water or irrigation districts. See Ball v. James, 451 U. S. 355 (1981); Salyer Land Co. v. Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage Dist., 410 U. S. 719 (1973). Just as the Mancari argument would have involved a significant extension or new application of that case, so too it is far from clear that the Salyer line of cases would be at all applicable to statewide elections for an agency with the powers and responsibilities of OHA.
We would not find those cases dispositive in any event, however. The question before us is not the one-person, one-vote requirement of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the race neutrality command of the Fifteenth Amendment. Our special purpose district cases have not suggested that compliance with the one-person, one-vote rule of the Fourteenth Amendment somehow excuses compliance with the Fifteenth Amendment. We reject that argument here. We held four decades ago that state authority over the boundaries of political subdivisions, "extensive though it is, is met and overcome by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution." Gomillion, 364 U. S., at 345. The Fifteenth Amendment has independent meaning and force. A State may not deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race, and this law does so.
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