Amendments to the Constitution 11-27
Amendment XXVI · Ratified July 1, 1971
Lowered the national voting age to eighteen.
Amendment XXVI · Ratified July 1, 1971
Court decisions citing this, by year.The marker is when it took effect. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Passed by Congress March 23, 1971. Ratified July 1, 1971.
Note: Amendment 14, section 2, of the Constitution was modified by section 1 of the 26th amendment.
Section 1. 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. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Ratified in 1971 to override Oregon v. Mitchell: the Twenty-sixth Amendment sets the voting age at 18 for all federal, state, and local elections.
Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112 (1970), was a U.S. Supreme Court case in which the states of Oregon, Texas, Arizona, and Idaho challenged the constitutionality of Sections 201, 202, and 302 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) Amendments of 1970 passed by the 91st United States Congress, and where John Mitchell was the respondent in his role as United States Attorney General. The Supreme Court ruled that the literacy test ban under Section 201, the minimum residency duration requirement for voter registration and the uniform rule for absentee voting in presidential elections under Section 202, and…
Katzenbach v. Morgan, 384 U.S. 641 (1966), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States regarding the power of Congress, pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment, to enact laws that enforce and interpret provisions of the Constitution.