Amendment Twenty-six to the Constitution was ratified on July 1, 1971. It lowered the voting age for all Americans to eighteen years, having previously been established as twenty-one years-old. The official text is:
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.
The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
At the time of its enactment in 1868, Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment established protections for the right to vote, specifically for the “male inhabitants of the state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States.” Nearly a hundred years passed before calls for lowering the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen emerged in the 1940s. With the lowering of the draft age from 21 to 18 for World War II, there began numerous Congressional proposals to match the voting age to the draft age. The idea was also endorsed by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first president to endorse the change, publicly supporting the lower voting age in his 1954 State of the Union address.
Later in the 1960s and early 1970s, the increasing public opposition to the Vietnam War renewed debates over lowering the right to vote. All male 18-20-year-old citizens could be drafted to fight and die in Vietnam, but they were unable to vote on America's prosecution of the war. Many individuals and groups who were in favor of lowering the voting age argued that if a citizen was old enough to serve the country in the military, then they should be able to have the right to vote at the same age. This led to the popular slogan “old enough to fight, old enough to vote.” At the same time, the increasing number of young American men and women graduating high school, going to college, and engaging in political and social activism led to an increasing national awareness of the process of crafting laws and Constitutional amendments.
As a response to the increasing calls for lowering the voting age, the 1970 extensions of the Voting Rights Act included a provision to change the minimum voting age to 18. President Richard Nixon signed the bill despite misgivings about the constitutionality of this provision. He was right, the new provision was quickly challenged in the Supreme Court case of Oregon v Mitchell. The Supreme Court determined that Congress has the authority to lower the voting age for federal elections, but not for state elections, thus the provision was ruled unconstitutional. Congress responded to the ruling with an amendment to lower the voting age for all levels of government. It was proposed and passed by both chambers of Congress in March 1971. After being sent out to the states for ratification, the new amendment – now recognized as the Twenty-sixth – was ratified on July 1, 1971. It was the fastest ratification of any Constitutional amendment.
The Twenty-sixth Amendment has faced a few legal challenges in the decades since its ratification, with the general arguments ranging from how a college student from out-of-town is represented at the polls, if the amendment extends any other political institutions such as serving on a jury, or if voter identification laws are valid and recognized beneath it. On its own, the Twenty-sixth Amendment addressed one of the domestic controversies that had emerged out of the wide military involvement of American citizens below the age of 21 from World War II through the Vietnam War. The 26th Amendment answered the question, "If you are old enough to fight, shouldn't you be old enough to vote?"