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The Twenty-sixth Amendment (Amendment XXVI) to the United States Constitution standardized the voting age to 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.

Text

Background

Suffrage to those 18 and older was endorsed by Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon. A law was passed in 1970 which was similar to this Amendment, but the States of Oregon and Texas challenged it in court, and the Supreme Court declared in Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112 (1970), the parts of the law that required states to register 18-year-olds for state elections to be unconstitutional. By this time, four states had a minimum voting age below 21.¹²

The 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, and died. "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote," was a common slogan used by proponents of lowering the voting age that traced its roots back to World War II, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt lowered the military draft age to eighteen. The idea was that people who were old enough to be drafted into the military should have a say in the selection of the civilian government that determines when and how military force is used. Although multiple Presidents had called upon Congress to propose a Constitutional amendment lowering the voting age, no attempt gained even modest success until after the decision in Oregon v. Mitchell, when forty-eight states were forced to either align their state voting ages with the new federal requirement or pay enormous sums of taxpayer money and risk Election Day confusion in 1972 with age-segregated balloting. The amendment passed through the Congress when it was reintroduced by Senator Jennings Randolph in 1971, and within months passed three-fourths of the state legislatures, faster than any other amendment. The Twenty sixth Amendment was formally certified by the Administrator of General Services on July 7, 1971.³

Amendment XXVI in the National Archives

Proposal and ratification

The Congress proposed the Twenty-sixth Amendment on March 23, 1971 and the following states ratified the amendment:⁴

1. Connecticut (March 23, 1971)
2. Delaware (March 23, 1971)
3. Minnesota (March 23, 1971)
4. Tennessee (March 23, 1971)
5. Washington (March 23, 1971)
6. Hawaii (March 24, 1971)
7. Massachusetts (March 24, 1971)
8. Montana (March 29, 1971)
9. Arkansas (March 30, 1971)
10. Idaho (March 30, 1971)
11. Iowa (March 30, 1971)
12. Nebraska (April 2, 1971)
13. New Jersey (April 3, 1971)
14. Kansas (April 7, 1971)
15. Michigan (April 7, 1971)
16. Alaska (April 8, 1971)
17. Maryland (April 8, 1971)
18. Indiana (April 8, 1971)
19. Maine (April 9, 1971)
20. Vermont (April 16, 1971)
21. Louisiana (April 17, 1971)
22. California (April 19, 1971)
23. Colorado (April 27, 1971)
24. Pennsylvania (April 27, 1971)
25. Texas (April 27, 1971)
26. South Carolina (April 28, 1971)
27. West Virginia (April 28, 1971)
28. New Hampshire (May 13, 1971)
29. Arizona (May 14, 1971)
30. Rhode Island (May 27, 1971)
31. New York (June 2, 1971)
32. Oregon (June 4, 1971)
33. Missouri (June 14, 1971)
34. Wisconsin (June 22, 1971)
35. Illinois (June 29, 1971)
36. Alabama (June 30, 1971)
37. Ohio (June 30, 1971)
38. North Carolina (July 1, 1971)
39. Oklahoma (July 1, 1971)

After its adoption, three other states voted to ratify the amendment:

1. Virginia (July 8, 1971)
2. Wyoming (July 8, 1971)
3. Georgia (October 4, 1971)

The following states have not ratified the amendment:

1. Florida
2. Kentucky
3. Mississippi
4. Nevada
5. New Mexico
6. North Dakota
7. South Dakota
8. Utah

References

External links

• National Archives: Twenty-sixth Amendment
• CRS Annotated Constitution: Twenty-sixth Amendment

Wikipedia content modification information:

• This page was last modified on 3 December 2008, at 00:33.

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