For most of our nation's history, the voting age was 21. So how'd we get it down to 18? In one sense, it was the fastest ratified amendment in history. In another, it took three decades. Our guide to the hard-won fight for youth enfranchisement is Jennifer Frost, author of "Let Us Vote!" Youth Voting Rights and the 26th Amendment.
Transcript
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:02] Nick. Now, there are times when even we so-called adults wonder when we will finally be all grown up. But in the United States, that age is pretty much 18.
Nick Capodice: [00:00:21] Yeah, that's the age you're allowed to finally say I'm a legal adult. I can make my own choices. Unless that choice is to, you know, [00:00:30] drink alcohol legally or rent a car. You can buy one, though, right? Which seems a little funny.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:00:36] It does. Social constructs are a little funny, Nick, and adulthood is one of those. And so is pretty much everything else here in the US. We set an age at which you acquire the rights and responsibilities of what we call adulthood. This is known as the age of majority. Now that age varies somewhat from state to state and from Responsibility [00:01:00] to liability, especially when it comes to juvenile versus adult courts of law. A little less so when it comes to marriage, finances, tattoos and cigarettes. But you know what doesn't vary, Nick? The age at which you can vote.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:21] Well, that is because it is the law of the land. It is a constitutional amendment.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:26] It sure is, Nick. It is the 26th amendment, [00:01:30] to be precise. And that is what we are talking about here today. This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: [00:01:34] I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:01:35] And the 26th amendment is a special one. You want to know why it had the fastest ratification in history, took a little over three months in 1971, but actually getting to that point took a little less than three decades. This is a story about federalism taking something that used to be left up to the states and making it a national law. It's a story of grassroots [00:02:00] organizing, coalition building, and that horatian aphorism canonized by English poetry teachers. In that one movie, every substitute teacher had on VHS in the 90s. Carpe diem.
Dead Poets Society: [00:02:11] Seize the day. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:17] Three decades.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:19] Oh, yeah.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:02:19] Three decades that included the civil rights movement, one very unpopular war, and a Supreme Court decision. So, without further ado, let's [00:02:30] do.
Nick Capodice: [00:02:34] All right. My first question is about what the voting age was before the 26th amendment was ratified, because the Constitution didn't say anything about voting age originally. And you've said it was something that was left up to the states. So was there an age that all the states agreed upon initially?
Jennifer Frost: [00:02:52] Well, this goes way back in English history, right? So the age of majority. So the age at which [00:03:00] you would have achieved adulthood becomes 21. So it's not you know, if we look at the medieval period or other periods, the age is shifting. But certainly, you know, by the time the American colonies are founded, the age of majority is considered 21.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:19] This is Jennifer Frost. She's an associate professor of history at the University of Auckland and the author of Let Us Vote. Youth Voting Rights and the 26th amendment.
Jennifer Frost: [00:03:29] Now, the [00:03:30] important thing is the US Constitution does not lay out criteria for voters. You know, the original Constitution left the qualifications for voters up to the state legislatures. So it's really at the state level that we get 21 being the age of majority and the age at which you would be able to vote for men.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:03:53] Now, the federal government does determine the age for certain things. For example, the age at which you must register [00:04:00] for selective service, also known as the draft.
Nick Capodice: [00:04:03] This is the thing I feel most people know about the history of the voting age. There's that famous slogan old enough to fight, old enough to vote, and I believe that is a conversation that started after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt lowered the draft age from 21 to 18, in World War two. Is that right?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:21] Yeah. And actually, the draft age was expanded twice during World War two. The Selective Training and Service Act, passed by Congress and signed [00:04:30] into law in 1940. This is prior to the US entering World War Two, required men ages 21 to 35 to register with their local draft board.
Speaker6: [00:04:41] The lottery will determine the order number of 750,000 who have reached their 21st birthday since the last draft. Another step toward the deferment of older Selectees.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:04:59] In 1941, [00:05:00] the act was amended to require men aged 18 to 64 to register, but only men aged 20 to 45 were on the hook for naval or land forces, aka the draft aka induction aka face and fighting in a war.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:19] Hold up. If you were only drafted up to the age of 45. What's going on with 46 through 64?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:26] This was referred to as a kid. You, not the old man's [00:05:30] registration. Oh, my. We weren't going to send men over the age of 45 to war, but we wanted to get a sense of our manpower. Literally, we were trying to figure out our industrial capacity here at home.
Nick Capodice: [00:05:43] Wow. All right. And what about the register at 18? But you don't get drafted till you're 20 thing.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:05:50] Yeah, that didn't last long. In 1942, Roosevelt gave a radio address that laid out the war effort and explained who was needed where. Specifically, [00:06:00] he said that he thought that older men should be contributing to efforts on the home front, and younger men should be conscripted into active duty. And he called on Congress to specifically amend the Selective Service Act to draft men starting at the age of 18, which they did in 1942.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: [00:06:18] Therefore, I believe that it will be necessary to lower the present minimum age limit for selective Service from 20 years down to 18. We have [00:06:30] learned how inevitable that is and how important to the speeding up of victory. I can very thoroughly understand the feelings of all parents whose sons have entered our armed forces. I have an appreciation of that feeling and so has my wife. I want every father and every mother who had a son in the service to [00:07:00] know again, from what I've seen with my own eyes, that the men in the Army, Navy and Marine Corps are receiving today the best possible training, equipment and medical care.
Nick Capodice: [00:07:19] So Roosevelt isn't saying, sorry parents who newly have to worry about their 18 and 19 year olds being sent overseas. He's addressing the parents whose kids are already serving. [00:07:30] But he also seems to be saying indirectly, don't worry about the younger ones. I promise you, we will train them really well.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:07:39] Right. It's almost like he can't apologize because this is something that's going to happen either way. But he wants to find a way to temper the fears of Americans who are like fighting at 18. Seriously. And that same year. Nick 1942. That was the year that this idea of old [00:08:00] enough to fight, old enough to vote worked its way into the American consciousness. There was a West Virginian congressman named Jennings Randolph. He is sometimes called the father of the 26th amendment.
Jennifer Frost: [00:08:12] And he's one of several congressional leaders. But he becomes the prominent voice and what I love about him, he completely believed in democracy, you know, small d democracy. And he believed in getting people out to vote and to utilize [00:08:30] their right to vote. And the story goes that he used to carry a piece of paper in his pocket. And when someone said, oh, why should I vote? One vote doesn't matter. And he would pull this piece of paper out of his pocket, and he would read a bunch of major decisions and bills that passed into law that passed by one vote. And he said, you think your vote doesn't matter. You know it matters.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:08:53] And he dedicated his career to lowering the voting age, starting by introducing constitutional amendment legislation in [00:09:00] 1942.
Nick Capodice: [00:09:01] Wait, but it didn't happen until 1971?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:04] Nope. But what did start to happen? Because there were plenty of politicians who agreed with Randolph, is that states started to lower their voting ages.
Nick Capodice: [00:09:15] Which they couldn't do for voting in the federal election, because that's a national thing.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:21] But they could do it for state and local elections. And Georgia did in 1943, lower the voting age to 18. Kentucky did the same in 1955. [00:09:30] All right.
Nick Capodice: [00:09:31] Well, that's a pretty slow trickle, Hannah. Is there something that finally did it? Like what ramped it up? What happened between 1942 and 1971 that made the 26th amendment finally seem possible?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:09:45] The 1960s happened, Nick, and we're going to get to that time of the season right after this break. Ba ba da da da.
Nick Capodice: [00:09:54] Tell it to me, Hannah, but not too slowly. Okay? We're going to be right back. But in the meantime, here's a little reminder [00:10:00] that we Civics 101 are the result of people coming together because they believe in something. Public radio is funded by you, the public. It belongs to you, the public, and Civics 101 is included in that. If you have the heart, mind and financial ability to support our show, please consider doing so at civics101podcast.org.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:10:41] We're [00:10:30] back and we're going back. Back to the era that set the stage for 18 year olds to win the vote The 1960s Narodnik. What happened in the 1960s?
Nick Capodice: [00:10:53] Oh, boy. Hannah. Well, what didn't happen in the 1960s? We have a whole lot. We have the Vietnam War. There's a big one. [00:11:00]
Archival: [00:11:00] At this time. We have a total of 160,000 men in our military units.
Nick Capodice: [00:11:06] We have Kennedy getting assassinated.
Archival: [00:11:09] President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time.
Nick Capodice: [00:11:14] And then we have the civil rights movement. Greatest of all, let.
Archival: [00:11:17] Us not forget that we are involved in a serious social revolution. And part.
Nick Capodice: [00:11:23] And parcel of the civil rights movement is a huge student movement, this huge counterculture movement.
Archival: [00:11:29] Our nation's [00:11:30] leadership, while striving for peace, has adopted a course that makes real peace unlikely.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:11:37] And the two most important things to keep in mind for the voting age are the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. So let's dig into this a little bit and start with the Civil Rights movement, which, it should be said, included a ton of student activists and young adults who were not of voting age.
Jennifer Frost: [00:11:59] And most [00:12:00] scholars and people who lived through that time would say the civil rights movement was an inspiration and an impetus to a lot of different groups thinking we should organize, be it students, be it women, be it Chicanos, be it Indigenous Americans, you know. So there is this kaleidoscope of movements that's emerging over the 1960s that, in a way, the civil rights movement being the prompt, but also the groundwork was laid for [00:12:30] lowering the voting age to 18 by the civil rights and voting rights movement. So, you know, we get the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which, you know, ends segregation in the South and does other things. But the next year in 65, we get the Voting Rights Act, which essentially enforces the 15th amendment, which says you can't deny the right to vote on the basis of race, color or previous condition of servitude.
Nick Capodice: [00:13:01] So [00:13:00] the 15th amendment, as well as several other amendments like the 14th and the 19th amendment, they have a clause that says that Congress can take action to make sure the amendment is enforced. Right. And the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it does the same thing. The federal government is saying, hey, states, you can't do those things you're doing, and we're going to enforce that by passing a law.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:13:24] And we do have an entire episode on the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But real quick, it required [00:13:30] certain voting jurisdictions that had a history of racially discriminatory voting laws to get approval from the United States District Attorney or a US district court before implementing or changing any voting laws. It also allowed the use of federal examiners to monitor elections and help people register to vote in certain regions of the country, and it also prohibited the use of literacy tests.
Nick Capodice: [00:13:57] But Hannah, none of these say anything about voting [00:14:00] age, and I feel like I have to point out here that not being able to vote until you're 21 means that you will eventually be able to vote, which is not the same as not being able to vote because of your race or your gender.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:14] Yes, absolutely. And I think the reason that age felt so urgent is the one thing that we haven't really talked about in detail yet, the Vietnam War, that made age a really important consideration.
Archival: [00:14:28] Next one after this one, Bruce [00:14:30] Black, the next 121 a California college dropout, he threatened to go over the hill rather than go to Vietnam. In a year, he is promoted to sergeant.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:14:42] In The US had been involved in the Vietnam War for over a decade by the mid 60s, and in 1965, President Lyndon B Johnson announced that he was deploying another 50,000 troops. By 1966, we had [00:15:00] over 380,000 young men deployed to Vietnam. At the same time, news coverage of the war made Americans increasingly mistrustful of the US government's decisions. Student run coalitions at campuses across the country burned draft cards.
Jennifer Frost: [00:15:16] The 60s bring a number of state level campaigns. So 1966 Michigan has a referendum that is on lowering the voting age to 18 that young people really [00:15:30] fight for. They lobby, they organize, they mobilize, they do all sorts of advertising. They bring in the big wigs, and they bring in Robert Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, not junior, his dad to make the case, the United Auto Workers is on board in Michigan. I mean, it is a really robust campaign.
Nick Capodice: [00:15:51] So do they win?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:15:53] No, the referendum did not pass.
Jennifer Frost: [00:15:56] And it's really taken as quite a defeat. And [00:16:00] it's interesting. It was you know, basically the arguments about young people aren't mature enough. You know young people haven't had enough life experience. But there was also this concern. Do we want to give the right to vote to these young people, right. Who are in the streets mobilizing? Et cetera. So it's a real kind of backlash against the activism of the 60s, and you would assume everybody would kind of cry and go home and give up. That's not what happens after November 66th, [00:16:30] when the Michigan referendum goes down to defeat.
Nick Capodice: [00:16:34] All right. So we've got a failed referendum in Michigan, a ton of protesters and a very Unpopular war. So what happens next?
Jennifer Frost: [00:16:43] Martin Luther King is assassinated. Robert Kennedy is assassinated. We have a turning point in the Vietnam War, where the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong launched their Tet Offensive, and a number of other things happened, including the president, [00:17:00] Lyndon Baines Johnson stepping down and not running again. So we're hearing echoes of that obviously today. So it was a very tumultuous year. There were anti-Vietnam protests, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which it's also in Chicago this year, was very conflictual.
Nick Capodice: [00:17:19] The 1968 DNC, otherwise known as maybe the wildest one that has ever been both inside and outside the convention.
Archival: [00:17:27] Members of the Youth International Party, Yippies, [00:17:30] they called themselves, converged on Chicago. They said they were there to protest the war, poverty, racism and other social ills. Some of them were also determined.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:17:40] And those protests, yes, they were about opposition to the Vietnam War. But the other major issue on the table, both for protesters and for the parties, was the voting age, which, as we know, was not lowered in 1968.
Archival: [00:17:57] This evening's activities climaxed a week of [00:18:00] protest activity by the children of Aquarius, and today was no different.
[00:18:04] Listen to us, Mr. Nixon. We've me the hope of a new tomorrow.
Jennifer Frost: [00:18:16] And some, I think, in Hawaii and Nebraska. There were state referenda to lower the voting age to 18. Those go down to defeat in 1968. So it's a time where some people are saying we're [00:18:30] doomed. You know, we're never going to make change. But there were other people who said, wait a second, you know, we were again protesting outside the Democratic National Convention, and we were inside. Some youth advocates were inside. And in fact, both political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats in 1968, in their platform, called for lowering the voting age to 18. So it's it's, you know, it's both this kind of moment of defeat, but this moment of, you know, we got to do something. And [00:19:00] so I say 68 is a turning point when they say we need a national movement. All the things happening in the States is great, but we need something to coalesce it all together. And we get the Youth Franchise Coalition being organized in late 68. It launches in early 69.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:18] And the young people in these movements had support from some of the people closest to them, their teachers.
Jennifer Frost: [00:19:23] So the National Education Association, you know, teachers believe in what they're doing in the classroom, [00:19:30] right? They believe that they are educating the future. They know they're educating the future, and they know that their students are interested in politics and care about politics, and so it makes sense they want to support that.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:19:46] And if you've listened to our episode on Strikes and Unions, you will know that in lieu of direct political power, there's another pathway to influencing the government. And the youth followed it.
Jennifer Frost: [00:19:55] A lot of young people were going right into the labor force like they are today, [00:20:00] and they were saying, wait, we've got union members who are 18, 19 and 20, you know, in the 40s, in the 50s, in the 60s, and they don't have a right to vote. You know, so the the labor unions, both, you know, the, the education ones, like the American Federation of Teachers, but the CIO at the time and then it becomes the AFL CIO. Absolutely. Were behind this finally.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:20:23] When it came to successful lobbying and organizing in the 1960s, the NAACP and other civil rights organizations pretty [00:20:30] much wrote the playbook. It worked for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and they could leverage those same tactics for the youth vote.
Jennifer Frost: [00:20:38] And then the coalition had a strategy document about how we're going to go about it. And that's where I think they also built on this long history of effort is their strategy was dual, right. So we're going to work at the state level to try to get referenda and or amendments passed at the state level to enfranchise young people. [00:21:00] But we're also work at the federal level. And I think it was that two pronged, what we would call bottom up organizing and top down organizing.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:08] So we're talking about different groups with different perspectives, maybe even different reasons for what they're doing, but they're all working towards the same goal.
Jennifer Frost: [00:21:17] And it meant you could come into the movement in a variety of ways, a movement that's really narrow, that says there's only one way to be part of this movement, right? Obviously, you're limiting who's going to be part [00:21:30] of your movement by being flexible and open. You know, you could come into the movement saying, hey, I really think young people should have the right to vote because, you know, they're educated and they're ready to participate. And I could argue, you know, I'm going to focus on the fact that young people are being drafted to fight in Vietnam, right? So doesn't matter. We don't have to agree on our primary argument for why this should happen, but we agree on the goal.
Nick Capodice: [00:21:57] Okay. So on the national level, was [00:22:00] the strategy to get an amendment or was it to pass a federal law? Because I feel like one of those ideas is a heck of a lot easier than the other.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:08] Ain't that the truth? Yeah, it did get a little messy, Nick. Messy enough, in fact, for the highest court in the land to weigh in.
Archival: [00:22:17] Oyez, oyez, oyez.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:27] But before we ask for the Supreme Court's [00:22:30] opinion, I want to talk about what's going on in Congress. It was 1969, and the clock was counting down on a couple of provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Do you remember the preclearance requirement? Do you remember what that was?
Nick Capodice: [00:22:44] No.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:22:45] Okay. So that is the part of the act that said that states and districts with a history of racial discrimination against voters had to get approval from the federal government before they could change their voting laws. And that provision was set to expire [00:23:00] in 1970. Okay.
Nick Capodice: [00:23:03] Is this the thing that came up in a relatively recent Supreme Court case about voting rights? Yeah.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:08] You're thinking of Shelby County v holder. That was in 2013 and it invalidated that preclearance formula. So today, no states or localities need to get federal approval to change election laws.
Nick Capodice: [00:23:21] But back to 1970, Congress had to talk about it, right? Like whether they were going to keep it or not. And that meant they [00:23:30] could talk about voting rights again.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:23:32] Bingo.
Jennifer Frost: [00:23:33] At the same time, the Senate holds hearings on an amendment to lower the voting age to 18, and this is the first time that the majority of people testifying, and they have people from the civil rights movement, from the labor movement, from the NEA, you know, et cetera. And all sorts of politicians testifying. They agree it should happen. The question that the hearings don't agree on is, how [00:24:00] do we do it through the Voting Rights Act of 1970? Do we do it through a constitutional amendment? Do we do it through the states? Right.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:07] Ultimately, Congress decided to put the language about lowering the federal voting age in an amendment to the Voting Rights Act, because an amendment to a law is way easier to pass than a constitutional amendment.
Jennifer Frost: [00:24:21] Now, this was controversial because many people worried that if you add a voting age of 18, 19, 20, you know, [00:24:30] to this Voting Rights Act of 1970, Will it doom the Voting Rights Act that we absolutely need? So there was a bit of concern is this, you know, is this going to be a poison pill for the Voting Rights Act of 1970? But when the lobbyists for the NAACP and other civil rights organizations said, let's go for it, and it ends up passing and it passes overwhelmingly.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:24:57] By the way, the Voting Rights Act of 1970, it [00:25:00] had three new provisions. And this is important because states are going to feel a certain way about this amended act. The first created new rules for voter registration and absentee voting. The second prohibited states from making their own residency requirements, and the third, known as title three, lowered the voting age of all Americans to 18 in all elections.
Nick Capodice: [00:25:21] So 1970. That's Richard Nixon. To be honest, I am a little surprised that Nixon went along with it. He was the main target [00:25:30] of anti-war protests taken up by many of these potential new voters.
Jennifer Frost: [00:25:34] He doesn't like that that is in there, that title three he doesn't like it, but he knows how important the Voting Rights Act was and is for protecting African Americans right to vote. So he signs it. He signs it reluctantly. And then he says, let's have a Supreme Court case. Let's have some litigation to see if this is constitutional, to lower the voting age to 18 through legislation [00:26:00] rather than through an amendment.
Nick Capodice: [00:26:02] All right. So Nixon was kind of like states, I leave this in your hands.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:26:07] Yeah. At the time, this amended version of the Voting Rights Act was passed, there were still only two states, Georgia and Kentucky, that had laws on the books allowing 18 to 20 year olds to vote in state and local elections. This was not a widely supported issue once you got to the state legislative level. And as we know, states are within their rights to say that a federal law is unconstitutional [00:26:30] and they can refuse to comply, at least until their argument is denied by federal courts. And most states did exactly that. They refused to comply.
Nick Capodice: [00:26:42] And then they sued, just like Nixon was hoping.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:26:45] And then they sued. Arizona, Idaho, Oregon and Texas sued the federal government in 1970, saying that the Voting Rights Act Amendments of 1970 infringed on the rights of states. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case known as Oregon v Mitchell. Mitchell [00:27:00] being John Mitchell, the Attorney General of the US at the time.
Archival: [00:27:03] We are seeking a decree that title three of the Voting Rights Act of 1970 is unconstitutional and enjoining the defendant from enforcing this title with respect to the plaintiff state.
Nick Capodice: [00:27:17] Were they just suing about the voting age? No.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:27:20] They also sued over literacy tests, state residency requirements, federal oversight of state election laws, all of these cases got lumped into [00:27:30] one because they all dealt with the Voting Rights Act.
Nick Capodice: [00:27:36] Got it. And what did the Supreme Court decide?
Hannah McCarthy: [00:27:39] This is the messy part. So first, the Supreme Court decided 5 to 4 that Congress did have the right to enact amendments that abolished literacy tests and state residency requirements for presidential and vice presidential elections. But they also decided that states could still impose residency requirements for state and local [00:28:00] elections. Now, when it came to the voting age.
Jennifer Frost: [00:28:03] It is a very unique decision because the court splits four said Congress has no role in determining voter qualifications like age, and the other four said Congress does have a role to do this, and it comes down to what we call they call a majority of one. That kind of splits the difference, which is Hugo Black. And what he says is Congress. He agrees with the conservatives that Congress [00:28:30] has no role for state voter qualifications, but he agrees with the more liberal side that that actually Congress does have a role for federal elections. So the decision comes down that says when you're 18, 19 and 20 year olds, you can't vote on state level elections, but you can vote on federal ones. Well, of course it was great in one way. People are going, oh my gosh, fantastic. You know, 18 year olds can vote for president and senator.
Nick Capodice: [00:28:58] So Justice Black establishes [00:29:00] that the federal government has a say in who gets to vote in federal elections, but not state elections. So, Hannah, just administratively, this is a little complicated.
Jennifer Frost: [00:29:15] It was going to be a nightmare for states and localities to administer, was going to cost a fortune. So what ends up happening out of the Supreme Court decision is all these state secretaries of state, they end up saying this is unmanageable. [00:29:30] We need consistency.
Nick Capodice: [00:29:33] So the secretaries of state signed on because they needed to be able to run their elections. And the law as it stood was making that really difficult.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:29:41] And that was the final piece that made the 26th amendment possible. Because remember when Nixon first signed the Voting Rights Act of 1970 into law, fewer than half of the states said that they would do it. But after the Supreme Court said, well, you have to do it when it comes to 18, 19 and 20 year olds voting on the national [00:30:00] ballot, the various secretaries of state were like, hang on, we are the ones actually running these elections. And they were going to their state legislatures and saying, we are not equipped to handle this right now.
Nick Capodice: [00:30:13] As in, it is administrative chaos to have one foot and one voting age for state and local elections and one foot in the other for federal elections.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:30:22] But there is a way out of this A way that ultimately the states would have to participate in. [00:30:30]
Jennifer Frost: [00:30:30] What the scholars argue is that constitutional amendments. They say there's four things that you need. You do need popular support. You do need legislative support. You do need judicial support, and you need support from the federal governments and the state governments. So some of the people who said it should let the states decide this. Well, actually the states do have a role because the states have to ratify an amendment. So, you know, when you when you have all [00:31:00] these different building blocks, it makes an amendment quite a robust process.
Nick Capodice: [00:31:07] Now hang on. To ratify an amendment you have to have an amendment to ratify. And I know we talked about that congressman who proposed such an amendment, but that was way back in 1942.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:31:18] Jennings Randolph.
Nick Capodice: [00:31:19] Yeah. Jennings Randolph. Was he still around?
Jennifer Frost: [00:31:24] He's there at the beginning and he's there at the end. His [00:31:30] career and his consistent advocacy over time. Proposing the 26th amendment again and again in Congress. He's there for the whole story.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:31:41] So he was still in office, but he was not the one to bring it back up. That was a senator from Indiana who had learned that it would cost states millions of dollars to register millions of young people to vote in completely separate systems. Never mind the fact that they would have to change their constitutions to comply with the age provision, and [00:32:00] probably couldn't do it in time. So several congresspeople proposed the 26th amendment in the very same, unchanged language that Jennings Randolph proposed in 1942.
Nick Capodice: [00:32:11] Wow.
Jennifer Frost: [00:32:12] It's the most quickly ratified amendment in US history, partly because of this administrative chaos that's going to happen, which has led some people to argue, oh, it was just an administrative maneuver. Right. It was just it was just [00:32:30] about making sure that voting processes were going to be easy to administer. And so, yeah, in the short run, there's no doubt that that administrative chaos was part of the argument. In fact, the House Judiciary Committee made that their main argument for we got to pass a constitutional amendment. But you don't even get that possibility without all the effort that came before. You know, so by just looking at that, you foreshorten the whole complex, [00:33:00] important history that got us to that point.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:33:03] Speaking of that whole complex, important history, Nick, I'm glad you brought up Jennings Randolph. He's the late West Virginia senator who was instrumental in the fight to lower the voting age, who gave young people a principal to levy against those who would deny them the vote. We're old enough to fight for you. Die for you. We're old enough to vote for you. When the 26th amendment was ratified [00:33:30] in 1971, Randolph got a call from the white House. Senator, would you like to select the first 18 year old who will register to vote?
Nick Capodice: [00:33:40] You're kidding. You're kidding.
Ella Marie Thompson Haddix: [00:33:42] And I just remember it was snowing.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:33:44] This is an excerpt from an interview done by West Virginia Public Broadcasting in 2021. It was with the woman who was that then 18 year old. Her name is Ella Marie Thompson Haddix. She's a retired schoolteacher. See, Randolph happened [00:34:00] to be in West Virginia when he got the call. So he asked the nearest college to please find an 18 year old ready and willing to register. And then he drove over there and picked her up.
Ella Marie Thompson Haddix: [00:34:13] And the roads were slick because Senator Randolph and I had to cross the street, and we held on to each other, crossing the street to the courthouse because we were afraid we'd fall down.
Hannah McCarthy: [00:34:24] Ella murray's older brother, Sergeant Robert Thompson, had been drafted to fight in the Vietnam War [00:34:30] in 1965. Two years later, he died fighting for his country. But without the right to vote in it. So it was particularly poignant for his sister to register, let alone to be the first 18 year old in the country to do it. She did have one misgiving, though. She was going to register. Republican Senator Jennings Randolph was a lifelong Democrat.
Ella Marie Thompson Haddix: [00:34:57] But he was very gracious about it. I told [00:35:00] him, you know, if he wanted to look for somebody else, that would be okay. And he said, no, absolutely not. It didn't matter whether it was Democrat or Republican. It was that, you know, he'd finally managed to get this 26th amendment through Congress. He it was his privilege to take an 18 year old to register.
Nick Capodice: [00:35:22] You know, if you want yet another reason to register to vote, there you have it. The guy who wrote the amendment doesn't [00:35:30] care how you do it. [00:35:32] Just do it.