The Twenty-Fourth Amendment

The Text

The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.

What It Says

No federal election may condition the vote on payment of a poll tax or any other tax.

What It Protects Against

Wealth as a voting qualification. The poll tax was the surviving mechanism that produced racial disenfranchisement without naming race, which the Fifteenth Amendment’s text did not reach.

Protocol Media reading. Not sourced to a ratification-era document.

Problem Addressed

Poll taxes remained in use in several Southern states nearly a century after the Fifteenth Amendment, functioning as a facially neutral barrier to Black and poor voters.