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The Unintended Consequences of Eighteen-Year-Old Voting

Laura Weinstein and Murray Heimberg’s 1961 divorce was highly contentious. A decade after divorcing, the couple, both college faculty members in Nashville, Tennessee, were still battling about support payments for their two minor sons. In May 1971, a clearly frustrated trial court judge ordered Mr. Heimberg to spend five weekends in jail for refusing to pay child support. On appeal, the Tennessee Court of Appeals not only reversed the “extremely harsh” jail sentence but also found that Mr. Heimberg’s support obligation had been extinguished by a new law that lowered the age of majority in Tennessee from twenty-one to eighteen. With almost palpable relief, the appeals court noted that both sons were now over the new statutory age of majority and therefore declared that “Dr. Heimberg’s legal duty to furnish maintenance, support, and education for these two sons [had] ceased” when each boy turned eighteen. The Weinstein–Heimberg divorce, while perhaps unusually combative, raised legal issues that were far from unique. After the national minimum voting age was lowered to eighteen in 1971, most U.S. states immediately lowered their statutory ages of majority to eighteen as well. At common law, parents are required to financially support their children until they reach the age of majority, so state courts quickly began holding that under these new laws, noncustodial parents only had to pay child support until age eighteen, not twenty-one. In the decades since, there has been extensive litigation about parents’ financial obligations toward children who are eighteen or older, particularly with respect to college costs. It is somewhat surprising that state legislatures reacted to eighteen-year-old voting the way they did, however. During the three decades of debate over the minimum voting age, from 1942 through 1971, the idea of lowering the age of majority was anathema to both sides. Furthermore, right up until ratification, most state legislatures were hostile to lowering the voting age, let alone revising other age-based laws. And as a general matter, states usually conceptualize their own interest as forcing family members to financially support dependents— especially children—as much as possible. Yet as soon as the voting age was reduced to eighteen through constitutional amendment, the overwhelming majority of state legislatures promptly revised their state laws to make eighteen the new age of adulthood for practically everything, not just the right to cast a ballot. On July 5, 1971, President Nixon signed the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which lowered the minimum voting age for state and federal elections from twenty-one to eighteen. While the amendment itself was the most quickly ratified constitutional amendment in U.S. history, beating out the record previously set by the Twelfth Amendment, eighteen-year-old voting had been nearly thirty years in the making.