Representation of the People Act 1969

The Representation of the People Act 1969 (c. 15) is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that lowered the voting age to 18 years. This statute is sometimes called the Sixth Reform Act.

Background
The 1960s were a period of growing political and cultural demands by young people in Britain, as in other Western democracies. The British political establishment developed a uniquely liberal response, described by Arthur Marwick, a British social historian, as "measured judgement".

Legislation
The Representation of the People Act 1969 extended suffrage to 18-year-olds, the first democratic nation to lower its age of franchise to include this age group. Previously, only those aged over 21 were permitted to vote.

Section 12 of the act allowed candidates to include on the ballot paper, alongside their name, a six-word description including party or other political affiliation. Previously, the "description" mandated by the Ballot Act 1872 was presumed to indicate profession, occupation, or social rank; political descriptions were deprecated, and definitively prohibited by the Representation of the People Act 1948. The 1969 act did not empower returning officers to challenge the accuracy of the description. The provision (restated in 1983) was exploited by spoiler candidates using descriptions confusingly close to those of major parties; notoriously, the Liberal Democrat candidate lost a 1994 Euro election when Richard Huggett took votes running as a "Literal Democrat". The Registration of Political Parties Act 1998 dealt with this problem by creating a register of political parties.

In local government elections, the act abolished plural voting, except in the City of London.

Aftereffects
The first election affected by this change of law was the Bridgwater by-election held on 13 March 1970 after the death of the sitting MP. The next general election was on 18 June 1970.

Case law subsequently established the right for undergraduate students to vote in the constituency of their university. This followed an appeal to the High Court.

The approach to the challenge of radical youth culture taken by the UK political establishment, which primarily involved strategies of co-option and compromise, was able to stymie much of the rising social and political tension that convulsed some other liberal democracies in 1968 through to the early 1970s.

The 1969 act, sometimes known as the Sixth Reform Act, did not extend the right to stand as a candidate for election to Parliament to under-21s. The age of candidacy for elections in the United Kingdom was lowered from 21 to 18 in 2006, with the passing of the Electoral Administration Act 2006.

The Representation of the People Act 1983 was in part a consolidation act which repealed the 1969 act but restated many of its provisions.