2 BRNOVICH v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE Opinion of the Court States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But an en banc court, by a divided vote, found them to be unlawful. It relied on the rules’ small disparate impacts on members of minority groups, as well as past discrimination dating back to the State’s territorial days. And it overturned the District Court’s finding that the Arizona Legislature did not adopt the ballot-collection restriction for a discriminatory purpose. We now hold that the en banc court misunderstood and misapplied §2 and that it exceeded its authority in rejecting the District Court’s factual finding on the issue of legislative intent. I A Congress enacted the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, 79 Stat. 437, as amended, 52 U. S. C. §10301 et seq., in an effort to achieve at long last what the Fifteenth Amendment had sought to bring about 95 years earlier: an end to the denial of the right to vote based on race. Ratified in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment provides in §1 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.” Section 2 of the Amendment then grants Congress the “power to enforce [the Amendment] by appropriate legislation.” Despite the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, the right of African-Americans to vote was heavily suppressed for nearly a century. States employed a variety of notorious methods, including poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications, “ ‘white primar[ies],’ ” and “ ‘grandfather clause[s].’ ” 1 Challenges to some blatant efforts reached this Court and were held to violate the Fifteenth Amendment. —————— 1 H. R. Rep. No. 439, 89th Cong., 1st Sess., 8, 11–13 (1965); S. Rep. No. 162, 89th Cong., 1st Sess., pt. 3, pp. 4–5 (1965); see South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U. S. 301, 309–315 (1966).