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In the United States, the debate about lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 began during World War II and intensified during the Vietnam War, when most of those subjected to the draft were too young to vote, and the image of young men being forced to risk their lives in the military without the privileges of voting successfully pressured ...
The Constitution of the United States recognizes that the states have the power to set voting requirements. A few states allowed free Black men to vote, and New Jersey also included unmarried and widowed women who owned property. [1] Generally, states limited this right to property-owning or tax-paying White males (about 6% of the population). [2]
Some states had already lowered the voting age: notably Georgia, Kentucky, and Hawaii, had already permitted voting by persons younger than twenty-one. The Twenty-sixth Amendment, ratified in 1971, prohibits federal and state laws which set a minimum voting age higher than 18 years.
Senator Harley Kilgore began advocating for a lowered voting age in 1941 in the 77th Congress. [5] Despite the support of fellow senators, representatives, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Congress failed to pass any national change. However, public interest in lowering the voting age became a topic of interest at the local level.
How people vote in the U.S. paints the political color of the entire country. However, it was never as simple as just going out to vote. Learn about the entire history of Americans’ struggles ...
They argue that voter turnout in the United States has not actually declined since 1972 when calculated as a percentage of the VEP instead of the VAP. [5] The following table shows the available data on turnout for the voting-age population (VAP) and the voting-eligible population (VEP) since 1932. [6] [7]
Additionally, the Court upheld the provision lowering the minimum voting age to 18 years in federal elections, but it held that Congress exceeded its power by lowering the voting age to 18 in state elections; this precipitated the ratification of the Twenty-sixth Amendment the following year, which lowered the voting age in all elections from ...
In August 1965, law school student Mitch McConnell was in his 20s and a veteran of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where he heard Martin Luther King Jr. deliver the "I Have a Dream ...