Poll Taxes

Poll Taxes are head taxes usually levied by local governments on adults within their jurisdiction. Compulsory poll taxes were employed in the United States from the colonial era until the early nineteenth century and a racially motivated poll tax came into use in the late nineteenth century. The Twenty‐fourth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1964, outlawed poll tax payments in federal elections.

Commonly used in colonial America though occasionally resisted by local populations, poll taxes aroused little concern. In fact, the United States Constitution provides for the raising of monies through such a tax but only if the tax is proportioned among the states (Art. I, sec. 9). Congress has never used this taxing power to raise money.

Under democratizing pressures demanding universal white male suffrage in the early nineteenth century, poll tax requirements dramatically declined. But Southern states resurrected their use as one of many ways to limit black political participation in the late nineteenth century. In Breedlove v. Suttles (1937), Justice Pierce Butler for a unanimous Court upheld state poll taxes as valid state controls over elections. Congressmen routinely proposed constitutional amendments to ban poll taxes in federal elections but none passed Congress until 1962, when only four states still retained the tax. The states ratified this amendment in 1964. In 1966, the Supreme Court declared state poll tax requirements for voting in state elections unconstitutional in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, overruling Breedlove. This decision, based on the Equal Protection Clause, cleared the way for greater federal judicial oversight of suspect state action inhibiting the franchise. Poll taxes disappeared in the late 1960s and currently no such burden exists upon the citizens' right to vote.

See also Race and Racism; Vote, Right to.

Thomas C. Mackey