What is the Twenty-Sixth Amendment?

The Twenty-Sixth Amendment establishes the minimum voting age in the United States as eighteen for federal, state, and local elections. Ratified on July 1, 1971, just one hundred days after Congress sent it to the states, it holds the record as the fastest constitutional amendment ever ratified. The amendment declares that 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 of the amendment authorizes Congress to enforce the voting-age guarantee through appropriate legislation.

The push for an eighteen-year-old vote gained momentum during the Vietnam War, fueled by the slogan old enough to fight, old enough to vote. The Selective Service was drafting eighteen, nineteen, and twenty-year-old men into combat while most states still required voters to be twenty-one. President Dwight Eisenhower had endorsed lowering the voting age in his 1954 State of the Union address, but the issue languished for years. Congress acted in 1970 by including a provision lowering the voting age to eighteen in the Voting Rights Act extension.

The Supreme Court partially upheld that provision in Oregon v. Mitchell (1970), ruling that Congress could lower the age in federal elections but not in state and local ones. Faced with the prospect of running separate election systems with different rules for different offices, Congress moved quickly. The Senate passed the amendment on March 10, 1971 by a vote of 94 to 0, and the House followed on March 23 by 401 to 19. Minnesota and Delaware ratified the next day, and Ohio became the thirty-eighth state to ratify on July 1, 1971.

President Richard Nixon signed the certification on July 5, declaring that we are not always the youngest of nations, but we are still the freshest. The amendment added approximately eleven million voters under twenty-one to the electorate in time for the 1972 presidential election. Subsequent legislation, including the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, further expanded access.

Voter turnout among eighteen to twenty-four year olds has historically been lower than for older age groups, though it surged in 2008 and again in 2020. Naturalization candidates need to remember that anyone eighteen or older who is a U.S. citizen and meets registration requirements may vote.