Texas law allows voters 65 years and older to vote by mail without excuse, but denies younger voters the same opportunity.  Three Texas voters under the age of 65 challenged this scheme on the ground that the express discrimination between adult voters of different ages violates the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which promises that the right to vote of all citizens eighteen and older “shall not be denied or abridged” by any state “on account of age.”

On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld Texas’s age-based restriction on mail-in voting. The Fifth Circuit held that the Twenty-Sixth Amendment’s constitutional prohibition on age discrimination in voting does not protect younger voters from facially discriminatory absentee voting laws.

CAC filed an amicus curiae brief urging the Supreme Court to grant the petition for a writ of certiorari and reverse the Fifth Circuit’s ruling.  We explain that the text and history of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment prohibit laws that deny equal voting opportunities to adult voters on account of age.  Going beyond simply extending the right to vote to those 18-21 years old, the broad language of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment expressly forbids age discrimination in voting in the same manner the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments outlaw discrimination in voting on the basis of race and sex.  Indeed, our brief shows that the Twenty-Sixth Amendment was intentionally modeled on the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments.  As a result, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment forbids the government from curtailing or diminishing the rights of any adult voter on account of age.  In the same way that voting laws may not limit mail-in voting to just men or just white people, they may not limit mail-in voting to just voters over 65.