Championing Youth Suffrage: The Journey of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment

The Twenty-Sixth Amendment was both ratified and passed in 1971 and allowed people the age of eighteen and up to vote in all levels (Local, State, Federal). Many people argued about the idea of eighteen year-olds being able to vote, and whether that they could be entrusted with it or not. It ended being passed as an Act in 1965, but became a Law in 1971.
The idea had started around World War Two, Roosevelt changed the drafting age, and people eighteen and above were being thrown into war. In the 1940s, people started to argue that if citizens were old enough to fight, then they were old enough to vote as well. Throughout World War Two, many Youth Movements had started, pushing for the new voting age and also many other

things. In the late 1960s, with the United States were involved in a long, expensive war in Vietnam, Youth Rights Activists demonstrated and marched to draw Legislators’ attention to the hypocrisy of sending young citizens to war who didn’t have the right to vote. In 1969, no less than sixty decisions were introduced in Congress to lower the minimum voting age, but none came with any action. The next year, when Congress passed a bill elongating and changing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it contained a requirement that lowered the voting age to 18 in Federal, State and Local elections. Though he signed the bill into Law, President Nixon stated that he believed the Law to be unconstitutional. “Although I strongly favor the 18-year-old vote,” Nixon continued, “I believe–along with most of the Nation’s leading constitutional scholars–that Congress has no power to enact it by simple statute, but rather it requires a constitutional amendment.”