Poll Tax

POLL TAX IS a term most often associated with basing the right to vote on a person's status and location of residence. This was not the original intention of the tax. English in origin, the term poll means “head” and it came to be associated with a per-person tax. However, America, as the new nation struggled to establish voter fairness within its Constitution, saw the poll tax erect unnecessary barriers to voter participation. Georgia introduced the poll tax in 1871 to establish which citizens were permitted to vote. Following Georgia's lead, [Page 539]every other former Confederate state invoked a poll tax by 1904. The annual tax of $1–2 was often too much for many poor African-American and white sharecroppers, who usually exchanged their survival for services rendered. It is estimated that the Georgia poll tax reduced overall voter turnout by almost one third, and African-American turnout by about one half.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1937 that the poll tax was a legitimate tool for states to raise revenue. The court went on to explain that the Nineteenth Amendment of the Constitution regulated voting practices, not taxation. Challenges to the poll tax were based on the assertion that the tax was being used to disenfranchise voters, not to collect revenue. Such claims were bolstered by the fact that none of the Confederate states that used the poll tax prosecuted individuals for failure to pay the tax. Furthermore, since the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited outright disenfranchisement on the basis of race or prior enslavement, early challenges to the tax were expected to be successful. These challenges failed, and the poll tax effectively made it difficult for African Americans, Native Americans, and whites of non-British descent to exercise their right to vote.

Georgia's former poll tax reduced overall turnout by about one third, and African-American turnout by about one half.

It took a unique constitutional amendment to prohibit the use of poll taxes in federal elections. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment was introduced in 1962, and ratified in 1964, making the application of poll taxes in federal elections a violation of civil rights. Shortly thereafter, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited the use of poll taxes in state elections. States persisted in their wish to use poll taxes, but the U.S. Supreme Court in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Education (1966) declared poll taxes in any elections to be a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause.

Even with these legal protections in place, creative politicians in the 21st century are trying to reintro-duce a form of poll tax to stamp out voter fraud. Georgia proposed the passage of a voter-identification law in 2005. With this legislation, Georgians who do not have government-issued identification could only vote by securing a special digital identification card from the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), $20 for five years, the duration of one federal election cycle. This law replaced the process Georgians used in the past, where one of 17 types of identification showing a person's name and address could be parlayed to gain access to the local voting booth. However, it was revealed that there were no DMV offices in the City of Atlanta, and only 58 of the state's 159 counties had DMV offices, a fact that opponents claim is just another barrier to voter participation. Further debate will be focused on what opponents call an unfair $10 per year poll tax, versus the proponents' claim to stamp out voter fraud.

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