26th Amendment

U.S. Constitution of 1787

26th Amendment

#	US Constitution Amendment	Proposal Date	Enacted Date
26th	Establishes the right to vote for those age 18 years or older - Signers: Speaker of the House Carl Albert (OK-D) & US Senator Allen Joseph Ellender (LA-D)	March 23, 1971	July 1, 1971

The Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution bars the states and the federal government from setting a voting age higher than eighteen. 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.

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.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his 1954 State of the Union address, became the first president to publicly state his support for prohibiting age-based denials of suffrage for those 18 and older.   On June 22, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed an extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required the voting age to be 18 in all federal, state, and local elections. In his statement on signing the extension, Nixon said: “ 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.”

Dr.Naomi Yavneh Klos at the 24th, 25th, 26th, and 27th Amendment Case  

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 that required states to register 18-year-olds for state and local elections.  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.

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 conscripted to fight in the war were ineligible to vote, 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.  On March 23, 1971, the House of Representatives voted 401–19 in favor of the proposed amendment.  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.

Exhibited is a photograph of the official 26th Amendment Joint Resolution of Congress, dated, with a printed copy of the Amendment dated January 21, 1971 and signed by  Carl Albert as Speaker of the House. 

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