Youth Suffrage

The most recent constitutional change affecting the right to vote was the lowering of the voting age to eighteen. The Twenty-sixth Amendment made the change in 1971.

Before World War II no state permitted voting by persons under twenty-one. Led by Georgia's wartime lowering of the voting age in 1943, after a drive marked by the campaign slogan “Fight at Eighteen, Vote at Eighteen,” several states passed the more liberal requirement. President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed a constitutional amendment in 1954, but it died in a Senate committee.

Sixteen years later, in the midst of the Vietnam War, Congress included an age provision in the 1970 amendments to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The amendments set a minimum voting age of eighteen for all federal, state, and local elections. But later in 1970, by a 5–4 vote in Oregon v. Mitchell, the Supreme Court declared the age requirement unconstitutional for state and local elections. Although it upheld most other sections of the act, including the lower voting age in federal elections, the Court said Congress exceeded its authority in attempting to overrule state constitutions that set the voting age between nineteen and twenty-one.

Congress and the states promptly moved to correct the situation, which would have required election officials in some states to maintain two sets of voter registration rolls—one for presidential and congressional elections, and the other for state and local elections. Ratification of the Twenty-sixth Amendment in 1971 took only 107 days—less than half the time needed to ratify any other amendment.

The amendment states: “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.”

Test Case Sought