18-Year-Olds Get Right to Vote– But Not Quite Yet
On this day, President Richard Nixon signed an extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which included a provision granting 18-year-olds the right to vote in federal and state elections.
The Supreme Court, however, declared the law unconstitutional in Oregon v. Mitchell, on December 21, 1970. The Court held that Congress did not have the authority to usurp the power of the states to set their own qualifications for voting.
Eighteen-year-olds finally got the right to vote with the ratification of the Twenty-sixth Amendment, on July 5, 1971.
Controversy over the right to vote from 2000 to the present involves conservative efforts to suppress the vote, particularly by African Americans, Latinos and poor people. Learn about the ACLU’s efforts to fight voter suppression.
Read about the struggle for the right to vote: Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015)
Learn more: Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in America (2000)
And more about the early history of the right to vote: Marchette Chutte, The First Liberty: A History of the Right to Vote in America, 1619-1850 (1969)
And about the struggle to protect the right to vote today at FairVote