Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution

**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.

## Text
## 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.

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.

In 1963, the President's  on Registration and Voting Participation made a report to President Lyndon B. Johnson.  The report  Johnson to lower the voting age.

### Support
 is fighting in Vietnam]]
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.

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.'"

Other people argued that teenagers did not know enough to have the right to vote.  One historian writes:

Others  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."

President Nixon disagreed with Kennedy. He was not against lowering the voting age. However, he did not agree with Kennedy's legal argument. He also worried that if the Supreme Court thought the new Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, they could overturn it  cancel the entire law. Nixon thought this could cause a lot of damage to the country.

However, on June 22, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed an extension (an ) to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  The change required the voting age to be 18 in all federal, state, and local elections. After signing the change, Nixon said:

After Nixon signed this change, about 17 states refused to change their minimum voting ages to 18.  This was just four months after Nixon signed the change.  By this time, four states had lowered their minimum voting ages: Georgia, Kentucky, Alaska, and Hawaii.

In *Oregon v. Mitchell*, the Supreme Court looked at whether the voting age changes that Congress added to the Voting Rights Act were constitutional.  This means they looked at whether the changes agreed with the rules in the Constitution, or broke them.  The judges on the Supreme Court strongly disagreed with each other in this case.  Eventually, five out of the nine judges agreed on a decision - just enough to reach the majority needed for a decision.  However, most of the judges did not agree on which legal reason was behind their decision.

The Court ruled that Congress could set a voting age for federal elections, but not state or local elections.

## The Amendment
After the Supreme Court's decision, both Congress and the states wanted to find a way to lower the minimum voting age throughout the country.  Congress decided to  a Constitutional amendment that would set the minimum voting age at 18 everywhere in the country.  This would be different than the change to the Voting Rights Act in a few ways.

First of all, the states did not want to deal with the cost and difficulty of having to keep two different voting registers, so they supported the idea of a Constitutional amendment.  Even the *New York Times* changed its official opinion and supported the Amendment.

### Approval by Congress
On March 10, 1971, the United States Senate voted 94–0 in support of proposing an amendment that would lower the minimum voting age to 18 everywhere in the country. On March 23, the United States House of Representatives voted 401–19 for the amendment.  It took just three months for 38 states to ratify the Amendment.  After the Amendment was added to the Constitution, another five states ratified it.  Seven states never did.

The states ratified the Amendment in this order:

### Ceremony
On July 5, 1971, President Richard Nixon held a ceremony at the White House, where he signed the Twenty-sixth Amendment just to show his support.  (The President does not have to sign an amendment in order for it to be added to the Constitution.)  During the signing ceremony, he talked about his  in the United States' young people:

## Notes
## References