There is not a significant Twenty-Sixth Amendment Supreme Court case. But I started reading the leading circuit cases and came away unimpressed.
Here’s an example. During the pandemic, some states enacted laws that gave older people special privileges with respect to mail-in voting. These laws were upheld against 26th Amendment challenges. One argument those courts made was that in 1971 (when the 26th was ratified) the “right to vote” was generally understood to mean in-person voting. Accordingly, mail-in voting rules do not implicate the “right to vote.”
But this cannot be right. If there were special mail-in rules for whites or women, those would not be upheld under the 15th or 19th Amendments even though voting in those eras was also primarily in-person.
Another argument in the recent cases was that giving some people a special privilege or waiver does not “abridge” the rights of others. Again, I don’t think that logic would work under the other suffrage amendments.
Now it could be that the pandemic was a public health emergency that justified a temporary exception to the 26th Amendment. So the holdings of the recent cases may be correct. But that would mean that the exception cannot continue.
The upshot is that there is ample room for a Twenty-Sixth Amendment originalist article that will give that text its due. Maybe I’ll turn to that after I get the current article done and try it out for Originalism-Works-In-Progress in San Diego.