The Twenty-Sixth Amendment

The drive to lower the voting age gained force during the Vietnam War. Young men were being conscripted at 18 and sent to fight in a conflict they could not vote on. The slogan "old enough to fight, old enough to vote" captured a moral argument that proved difficult to answer. Some states had already moved on their own. Georgia had set the voting age at 18 in 1943. Kentucky followed in 1955. By the late 1960s, the question was when, not whether, the federal threshold would fall.

Congress first tried to lower the voting age by statute in the Voting Rights Act Amendments of 1970. The Supreme Court held in Oregon v. Mitchell that Congress could lower the voting age in federal elections but not in state and local ones, on federalism grounds. The decision created an impractical patchwork in which an 18-year-old could vote for President but not for governor or mayor. Congress responded by proposing the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in March 1971. The amendment was ratified by the required three-fourths of the states in just 100 days, the fastest ratification of any constitutional amendment.

The text is short and unambiguous: "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 gives Congress the power to enforce the amendment by appropriate legislation. The first national election in which 18-year-olds voted was the presidential election of 1972. The amendment continues the sequence of franchise-expanding amendments that runs from the Fifteenth through the Nineteenth and the Twenty-Fourth. Turnout among 18-to-21-year-olds has historically lagged that of older voters, but the constitutional question of who is entitled to participate in American self-government has been answered.