The Twenty-fourth Amendment

The Twenty-fourth Amendment provides that the right of citizens to vote in any primary or other election for President, Vice President, presidential electors, senators, or representatives shall not be denied or abridged by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax. Poll taxes spread across the South after Reconstruction as one of several devices, along with literacy tests and white primaries, used to keep Black citizens and many poor white citizens from voting. Unpaid taxes often accumulated from year to year, compounding the barrier.

Many Southern states abandoned poll taxes on their own by the 1950s, but five, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia, still required them when Congress proposed the amendment on August 27, 1962. It was ratified on January 23, 1964. Because it covered only federal elections, some states kept poll taxes for state elections until the Supreme Court held in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections in 1966 that conditioning any vote on paying a tax violates the equal protection clause.

The amendment remains part of modern voting disputes. Courts have considered whether costs associated with obtaining voter identification amount to a poll tax, and most states with photo ID laws provide free identification cards. Another debate concerns states that require people with felony convictions to pay fines, fees, and restitution before regaining the right to vote, which a federal appeals court upheld in Florida in 2020. Supporters of such requirements say they enforce sentences, while critics call them a modern wealth barrier to voting.