TWENTY-SIXTH AMENDMENT

Congress proposed the Twenty-Sixth Amendment on March 23, 1971. Ratification was completed in 107 days, the shortest time ever required to complete the amending process. The amendment standardized the voting age in all federal, state, and local elections at eighteen.

Under the Constitution the power to establish qualifications for voting in all elections was left to the states, except that the qualifications to vote for representatives in Congress (and, after the seventeenth amendment, for senators) had to be the same as those to vote for members of the most numerous branch of the state legislature. Under various amendments, voting rights could not constitutionally be denied or abridged on account of race, color, previous servitude, sex, or failure to pay taxes; the fourteenth amendment set twenty-one as the highest minimum age a state could require for voters. Before 1970 only four states had enacted a minimum voting age lower than twenty-one.

In the voting rights amendments of 1970, Congress purported to lower the voting age to eighteen for all elections. The Supreme Court, in oregon v. mitchell (1970), upheld the statute, insofar as it pertained to federal elections, under Article I, section 4, which authorizes Congress to regulate the time and manner of elections of its members; but the Court held the act unconstitutional insofar as it pertained to state elections. The decision threatened to throw the 1972 elections into chaos, because in most states the voting age for balloting for federal officials would have been different from the voting age for state races. The rapidity with which the amendment was ratified is attributable to a general desire to avoid such chaos.

Although Congress, in proposing the amendment, expressed confidence in the "idealism and concern and energy" the new voters would bring to the political system, the actual effect of the amendment has been less than revolutionary. Empirical studies have shown that eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds have the lowest voter turnout rate of any age group; and those who do vote do not differ markedly from the rest of the population concerning political parties or issues.

Dennis J. Mahoney
(1986)