This month Congress takes up vital voting rights legislation: the For the People Act, which has already passed the House of Representatives, and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act. Exactly fifty years ago, in March 1971, federal lawmakers did the same, when they debated and overwhelmingly passed what would become the 26th Amendment. This amendment extended the right to vote to 18, 19, and 20-year olds. It was the last time that the United States significantly expanded voting rights.
Like today, Congress was under pressure to act. Also like today, voting rights advocates sought to ensure and expand this most fundamental right of citizens in a democracy. But an exceptional set of developments contributed to congressional pressure in early 1971. Most immediately, in late December 1970, the Supreme Court announced its ruling in the case of Oregon v. Mitchell, a judicial test of the Voting Rights Act of 1970. This new Act had extended and amended the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Although the 1965 Act had enabled an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 African Americans in the South to regain their voting rights, more still needed to be done. The 1970 Act provided a five-year extension and new coverage of jurisdictions outside the South, a national ban on literacy tests, and—most controversially—the 18-year-old vote.
This last amendment, Title III of the Voting Rights Act of 1970, guaranteed citizens 18 years old and up the right to vote in federal, state, and local elections. It fulfilled the aim of proponents of youth voting rights, like Jennings Randolph, Democrat of West Virginia, who had been working in Congress to lower the voting age for thirty years. Beginning in the early 1940s during World War II and lasting to the early 1970s in the context of the Vietnam War, proponents pushed for youth suffrage at the national and state levels. Early on only a few prominent figures and organizations were involved, and only the states of Georgia and Kentucky plus Guam, American Samoa, and Micronesia had the 18-year-old vote. But by 1969-1970, a sweeping number of state and territorial legislatures proposed lowering the voting age, and a national youth franchise movement had emerged. “The hour is striking now for 18-year-old voting,” declared Senator Randolph.