[2] MacKenzie unsuccessfully petitioned the California state courts for a writ of mandamus to compel the San Francisco Board of Election Commissioners to accept her voter registration application.

[4] During oral arguments held on November 11 and 12, 1915, Ethel MacKenzie's lawyer, Wilbur T. U'Ren, argued that congressional records show that Section 3 of the Expatriation Act of 1907 was only meant to apply to women residing outside the United States.

[5] Furthermore, U'Ren cited the Supreme Court's 1856 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which found that the Missouri Compromise's creation of free states that assigned African-Americans rights equivalent to those of White American citizens did not confer implied US citizenship on these Black individuals.

[5] In a unanimous decision issued on December 6, 1915, Associate Justice Joseph McKenna rejected all of MacKenzie's arguments, maintaining the Supreme Court of California's denial of her voter registration application.

First, McKenna opined that for statutorily unambiguous provisions, courts should ignore arguments for alternative readings based on legislative intent on the assumption that the final text accurately reflects the views of its creators.

In the 1830 case Shanks v. Dupont, which occurred prior to the 1868 enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled that "marriage with an alien, whether friend or enemy, produces no dissolution of the native allegiance of the wife.

[1] Responding to protests by suffragettes, such as Ethel MacKenzie herself, the 1922 Cable Act amended United States nationality law to dictate that women would retain their citizenship upon marriage to an alien as long as their husband was eligible to become a citizen.

[2] The Supreme Court has repeatedly questioned its verdict in this case, such as its 2017 decision in Sessions v. Morales-Santana, which rejected sex-based differences in the residency requirement for unmarried parents to pass on their American citizenship to children born abroad.

"[18] In its 1958 Perez v. Brownell decision, the Supreme Court cited this case to uphold Section 401 of the Nationality Act of 1940, which considered voting in a foreign election and remaining outside of the United States in wartime to avoid military service as voluntarily renunciations of American citizenship.