The Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution (Amendment XXVI) lowered the minimum voting age in the United States from 21 to 18.
The United States Congress approved the amendment on March 23, 1971, and sent it to the states to be ratified. Within three months and eight days, the states had ratified the amendment, and it became part of the Constitution. This was the quickest amendment to be ratified in United States history.
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Background
Earlier legislation
Lowering the minimum voting age was not a new idea. In the United States, some people started trying to get the voting age lowered during World War II. During the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt lowered the military draft age to 18. This meant that men as young as 18 could be forced to join the military. To many people, it did not seem fair that the government thought these young men were old enough to fight a world war, but not old enough to vote in the country they were fighting for. "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote" became a common slogan.
United States Senator Harley Kilgore had begun supporting a lowered voting age in 1941. Many other Senators, Representatives, and the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, supported the idea. However, Congress never made any changes.
Kilgore's ideas did interest some of the states. In 1943, the Georgia state legislature passed a law lowering the voting age in the state to 18; in 1955, Kentucky did the same thing.
In his State of the Union address in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower became the first president to say publicly that he supported letting people ages 18 and older vote.
In 1963, the President's Commission on Registration and Voting Participation made a report to President Lyndon B. Johnson. The report encouraged Johnson to lower the voting age.
Support
During the 1960s, many Americans pushed both Congress and the state legislatures to lower the minimum voting age from 21 to 18. This was mostly because of to the Vietnam War. As the war went on, more and more people started to protest the war and become active. During that war, many young men were drafted and sent to fight in the war before they were old enough to vote. This meant they had no way to influence the people sending them off to risk their lives. Protesters started to use the slogan "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote" again.
Supporters also argued that the law treated eighteen-year-olds as adults in many other ways. For example, they had to pay income taxes. Supporters argued that this was "taxation without representation" meaning that 18- to 20-year-olds had to pay taxes, but had no say in what those taxes were or what they were spent on, because they could not vote.
In 1967, United States Representative William St. Onge pointed out: ""To tax our 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds without giving them the right to vote ignores the great rallying cry of our War of Independence that there [should] be 'no taxation without representation.'"
Similarly, in 1970, in a committee that was debating a possible Constitutional amendment to lower the voting age, Representative Thomas Railsback said: ""Our laws tax these 18-year-olds but our voting laws do not permit them representation in enacting that tax law. The Boston Tea Party was supposed to have been the spark that put that issue to rest in this country."
Opposition
Not everybody supported lowering the minimum voting age. Opponents to giving younger people the vote had several arguments. Many argued that teenagers were not mature or responsible enough to vote.
Other people argued that teenagers did not know enough to have the right to vote. One historian writes:
Others criticized the "old enough to fight, old enough to vote" argument. For example, in 1953, the popular magazine Collier's Weekly said this argument "doesn't justify giving young ladies of eighteen the right to franchise [vote]." They added: "If a man if old enough to vote when he's old enough to fight, then logically the man who is too old to fight out to lose the right to vote."
Another example comes from an editorial written by the New York Times in 1967. The paper wrote: "The requirements for a good soldier and for a good voter are not the same. For the soldier, youthful enthusiasm and physical endurance are [of most] importance; for the voter, maturity of judgment far outweighs other qualifications."
Finally, some people thought lowering the voting age was not that important for the country, and that it should be left up to each individual state.