Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
In a unanimous decision, the court rejected all three arguments. The first argument is invalid because wording was almost the same as the Fifteenth Amendment. Each used the same method of adoption so one cannot be valid and the other invalid. The second argument, that certain state legislatures did not have the power to ratify based on their own constitutions, is rejected because they were ratifying an amendment to the federal Constitution, and so is a federal function. The Court ruled the third argument a moot point because two other states after Tennessee and West Virginia (Connecticut and Vermont) who followed their own procedures would have been enough to ratify the amendment. But in addressing the substance of the argument, the Court went on to point out that the Secretaries of State of Tennessee and West Virginia each accepted the ratification by the legislatures making the ratification by those two states valid. The Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote but Lesser made it certain the right could be used even in states where the state constitution did not allow it.