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The Twenty-sixth Amendment (Amendment XXVI) to the United States Constitution limited the minimum voting age to no less than 18. It was adopted in response to student activism against the Vietnam War and to partially overrule the Supreme Court's decision in Oregon v. Mitchell. It was adopted on July 1, 1971.
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| “ | Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.
Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. |
” |
In his 1954 State of the Union address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower became the first president to publicly state his support for prohibiting age-based denials of suffrage for those 18 and older.[1]
On June 22, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed a law (not a constitutional amendment) which required the voting age to be 18 in all federal, state and local elections. In his statement on signing the extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Nixon stated:
Despite my misgivings about the constitutionality of this one provision, I have signed the bill. I have directed the Attorney General to cooperate fully in expediting a swift court test of the constitutionality of the 18-year-old provision.[2]
Subsequently, Oregon and Texas challenged the law in court. In Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112 (1970), the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the parts of the law which required states to register 18-year-olds for state and local elections. Justice Hugo Black stated:
I would hold that Congress has exceeded its powers in attempting to lower the voting age in state and local elections.[3]
By this time, four states had a minimum voting age below 21.[4][5]
This ruling meant that the law could only apply to federal elections, which meant states would have to have separate voting rolls for voters between 18 and 20 years old and special ballots for them to vote on federal races.[6]
Congress and the state legislatures felt increasing pressure to pass the Constitutional amendment because of the Vietnam War, in which many young men who were ineligible to vote were conscripted to fight in the war, thus lacking any means to influence the people sending them off to risk their lives. "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote," was a common slogan used by proponents of lowering the voting age. The slogan traced its roots to World War II, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt lowered the military draft age to eighteen.
On March 10, 1971, the Senate voted 94–0 in favor of proposing a Constitutional amendment to guarantee that the voting age could not be higher than 18.[7] On March 23, 1971, the House of Representatives voted 401–19 in favor of the proposed amendment.[8] Within four months after the Congress submitted it to the states, the amendment was ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures, the shortest time in which any proposed amendment has received the number of ratifications needed for adoption.
On July 5, 1971, during the amendment's signing ceremony in the East Room, President Richard Nixon talked about his confidence in the youth of America.
As I meet with this group today, I sense that we can have confidence that America’s new voters, America’s young generation, will provide what America needs as we approach our 200th birthday, not just strength and not just wealth but the “Spirit of ‘76’ a spirit of moral courage, a spirit of high idealism in which we believe in the American dream, but in which we realize that the American dream can never be fulfilled until every American has an equal chance to fulfill it in his own life.[9]
The Congress proposed the Twenty-sixth Amendment on March 23, 1971, and the following states ratified the amendment:[10]
After its adoption, four more states voted to ratify the amendment:
The following states have not ratified the amendment:
On July 7, 1971, the Administrator of General Services officially certified the adoption of the Twenty-sixth Amendment.[11]