Voting Rights Act Extension of 1970: Nationwide Literacy Test Ban and Voting Age Lowered to 18

President Nixon signed the Voting Rights Act Amendments of 1970, extending the VRA’s special provisions for another five years, banning literacy tests nationwide, and lowering the voting age to 18 for all elections. The legislation represented significant expansion of federal voting rights protections, though the voting age provision was partially invalidated by the Supreme Court, ultimately prompting the Twenty-Sixth Amendment.

The 1970 amendments suspended literacy tests and similar devices in all states for five years, extending protections beyond the Southern jurisdictions originally covered. This nationwide ban reflected recognition that literacy tests, while originating as Southern Jim Crow mechanisms, had been used to disenfranchise voters throughout the country. Attorney General John Mitchell, despite serving a president who had employed the “Southern Strategy” to court white voters, supported the extension as essential to preventing backsliding.

Congress lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, responding to arguments that those old enough to be drafted for Vietnam should be allowed to vote. The “old enough to fight, old enough to vote” argument had gained powerful momentum as anti-war sentiment grew. However, in Oregon v. Mitchell (1970), the Supreme Court ruled that Congress could set voting age requirements for federal elections but not for state and local elections. This fractured ruling would have created an administrative nightmare requiring separate voter rolls for different elections, accelerating ratification of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in 1971.

The amendments also expanded Section 5 preclearance requirements to additional jurisdictions based on voter registration and participation data. The residency requirement for presidential elections was standardized at 30 days nationwide, preventing states from using lengthy residency requirements to disenfranchise mobile populations.

Nixon signed the bill despite misgivings about federal intervention in elections and his administration’s broader hostility to civil rights enforcement. His support reflected political calculation rather than commitment: voting against voting rights would have been politically costly, and the administration could slow enforcement administratively. The 1970 extension demonstrated that the VRA had become institutionally entrenched enough to survive hostile administrations, setting a pattern that would continue through subsequent reauthorizations until Shelby County v. Holder gutted Section 5 in 2013.