In this session, students learn about voting rights in America through a historical exploration of the right to vote in America. The right to vote has long been considered one of the cherished freedoms key to American democracy. But voting rights in general…. The text of the Amendment expressly extended to congressional elections, the selection of presidential electors, and presidential primaries.
But it only extended to federal elections, a more modest effort to secure sufficient congressional support. Congress hoped that the Amendment would exert practical pressure on state elections—if states wanted to keep poll taxes for state elections, they would have to develop separate voter registration systems and maintain different ballots for federal and state elections.
This pressure had little effect—four states persisted in using poll taxes in state elections. Ample evidence of racial discrimination surrounding literacy tests led Congress to find them a prohibited device and forbid states from using them. It authorized the Attorney General to initiate litigation for individualized determinations in federal courts as to whether existing poll taxes discriminated on the basis of race. Subsequently, the Attorney General began mounting such challenges.
Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections. But they are a window into a process that occurred when voting rights were left primarily to the political domain, and to the complicated framework for regulating elections in our Constitution. In Harman v. And in Harper v. These laws do not impose a direct tax on voting, such as a fee to obtain a voter identification card, which would directly run afoul of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment. Instead, these laws create indirect economic burdens on the right to vote.
Consider laws that require a free voter identification card. What if obtaining the card requires securing documents, such as birth certificates, which require a fee to obtain? Or consider laws that permit early voting, weekend voting, and multiple polling places.
Those laws make it easier for low-income voters to participate in the electoral process as compared to laws that require voters to travel long-distances to vote on a single Tuesday.
Another example: 48 states have laws that restrict voting—either permanently or temporarily—by convicted felons, preventing an estimated 6. A disproportionate number are people of color. In Hunter v. Underwood , the Supreme Court held that such statutes are generally constitutional unless they are intentionally racially discriminatory. But what if a state restored voting rights to felons only if they paid a fine?
Although federal courts have reviewed such statutes, since Harman and Harper they have not relied on the Twenty-Fourth Amendment in their review. For example, in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board , the Supreme Court considered an Indiana statute requiring state-issued voter identification.
The Court noted that Indiana provides free voter identification cards, and found that the effort required to obtain the card did not create an unconstitutional burden. The Court did not rely on the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, instead applying a Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause analysis using a framework it had established in cases such as Anderson v.
The plaintiffs in Crawford had not raised Twenty-Fourth Amendment claims. Perhaps it is because of the robust protections offered by the Fourteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act, adopted pursuant to the Fifteenth Amendment. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act had been a particularly potent tool. Under Section Five, certain jurisdictions with a history of racially discriminatory voting practices are required to seek preclearance from the Department of Justice or the federal district court in Washington D.
However, in Shelby County v. Holder , the Supreme Court invalidated the formula used to determine which jurisdictions are covered, rendering Section 5 impotent. It is time to reconsider the Twenty-Fourth Amendment as a tool to ensure voting fairness.
With the defanging of Section 5, and a Supreme Court that for decades has been less solicitous of racial discrimination claims generally, renewed attention to the Amendment could create new opportunities to protect the fundamental voting rights of our most vulnerable voters.
In considering this, it is important to remember that the Twenty-Fourth Amendment has a role distinct from those of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which were adopted to provide equal citizenship to the former slaves.
Although the Twenty-Fourth Amendment was adopted during the Civil Rights Movement as a direct response to the use of poll taxes to undermine the rights of Black voters, arguably the Amendment is primarily concerned with wealth, not race. When Americans think of the poll tax, we tend to focus on the laws adopted by Southern states as part of their successful efforts to disenfranchise Black voters during Jim Crow.
But America also has a long history of wealth-based restrictions on the franchise. In Colonial America, every colony limited the franchise to white men who owned property or had sufficient income. Independence saw many of the new states adopt poll taxes as an alternative to property ownership. Arguably, this represented a step forward in liberalizing the franchise because you did not need to be a landowner to pay a poll tax.
Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most States continued to expand the white male franchise by abolishing even poll taxes. When Southern States began re-introducing poll taxes as part of Jim Crow in the later part of the nineteenth century, beginning with Tennessee in , their primary aim was to impede Black political progress. The 24th Amendment eliminates the poll tax, a state fee on voting. Poll taxes were used to keep low-income citizens from participating in elections.
New Hampshire becomes the first state to eliminate the rule that only property owners and taxpayers could vote. North Carolina becomes the last state to eliminate the rule that citizens must own property to vote, effectively extending the right to vote to all white men, including migrants and transients, within the United States. Four years after the end of the Civil War, the 15th Amendment, the final Reconstruction amendment, grants the right to vote to newly freed slaves and other men of color in the United States.
In Guinn v. United States , the U. Supreme Court finds unconstitutional Jim Crow laws, which helped enforce segregation in Southern states. As a result, illiterate white men could vote but not illiterate blacks, since as a general rule their grandfathers had been slaves. Such regulations, which were intended to disenfranchise former slaves and other people of color, continued to persist as a method of circumventing the specific wording of the 15th Amendment well into the 20th century.
During this period of racial segregation, many Southern states adopt the policy of collecting a poll tax from voters on Election Day. This tactic successfully denied the right to vote to many African American voters who could not afford the tax.
In yet another case that disenfranchised African American voters, the U.
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