The Choice: The 24th Amendment: Eliminating the Poll Tax
Even today, efforts to destroy the 1965 Voting Rights Act continue.
Issue #962 The Choice, Friday, November 28, 2025
Every Friday until the end of 2025, we will publish a post about each of the 27 Amendments to the Constitution.
The 24th Amendment was ratified on January 23, 1964. Its primary purpose was to abolish the poll tax as a prerequisite for voting in federal elections. This transformative piece of legislation addressed the disenfranchisement of African Americans, other people of color, and poor white people who were disproportionately affected by the poll tax.
Southern states of the former Confederate States of America adopted poll taxes in both state laws and state constitutions throughout the late-19th and early-20th centuries.
It wasn’t until the early 1800s that white men without property could legally vote. The Supreme Court of the United States held that the poll tax used by states was constitutional in the 1937 case Breedlove v. Suttles.
Women were not allowed to vote until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, and women of color were still discriminated against with laws and policies like the poll tax.
Native Americans, who had inhabited this region for millennia, finally received U.S. citizenship on June 2, 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act (also known as the Snyder Act). This act granted citizenship to all non-citizen Indians born within the United States.
When the 24th Amendment was ratified in 1964, five states still retained a poll tax: Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia.
Prior to the 24th Amendment, the poll tax was one of several Jim Crow-era policies designed to suppress the vote among African Americans and poor citizens. By imposing a financial burden on those wishing to exercise their right to vote, these laws effectively excluded a significant portion of the population from participating in the democratic process.
The 24th Amendment’s proposal was passed by Congress on August 27, 1962, and ratified by the required number of states in January 1964.
The passage of the 24th Amendment was a catalyst for subsequent legislative advances, most notably the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which sought to eliminate other discriminatory practices that impeded voting rights.
The Justice Department once described the Voting Rights Act (VRA) as the most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever enacted. President Lyndon B. Johnson, when he signed the bill on Aug. 6, 1965, called it “one of the most monumental laws in the entire history of American freedom.”
In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections that poll taxes for any level of elections were unconstitutional. It stated that poll taxes violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Efforts to weaken the Voting Rights Act (VRA) have primarily been through Supreme Court decisions and state-level legislative changes, most notably the Shelby County v. Holder ruling that eliminated the preclearance requirement.
This has enabled states to pass laws restricting voting access, and the Justice Department and civil rights groups are now fighting these restrictions through litigation and lobbying for new legislation, such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Today, as MAGA Republicans and many Southern states are still trying to restrict the voting rights of Democrats and non-white citizens, a reminder that undocumented immigrants and non-citizen documented immigrants cannot vote because they are not citizens.
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