What is the Twenty-Fourth Amendment?

The Twenty-Fourth Amendment prohibits poll taxes and any other tax as a condition of voting in federal elections. Ratified on January 23, 1964, the amendment declares that 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. The amendment includes a Section 2 enforcement clause that empowers Congress to pass legislation carrying it out.

Poll taxes had been used since the late nineteenth century, especially in southern states, as one of several devices designed to suppress Black voter participation alongside literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and white primaries. Mississippi adopted a poll tax in 1890, followed by South Carolina in 1895, Louisiana in 1898, North Carolina in 1900, Alabama and Virginia in 1901, Texas in 1902, Georgia in 1908, and Arkansas in 1908. The taxes were typically one or two dollars, a modest sum on its face but a substantial barrier to poor voters of all races, and many states imposed cumulative requirements that demanded back payments before allowing registration. The Supreme Court had upheld poll taxes in Breedlove v. Suttles (1937).

The Twenty-Fourth Amendment moved through Congress in 1962. The Senate passed it in March 1962 and the House followed in August. Ratification took less than two years, with South Dakota providing the thirty-eighth and decisive vote on January 23, 1964. President Lyndon Johnson hailed it as a triumph of liberty over restriction.

Two years later Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections (1966) extended the ban to state and local elections under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, fully eliminating poll taxes from American elections. Several southern states adapted by tightening other voting requirements, but the Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed shortly after the amendment, provided federal enforcement against discriminatory voting practices including literacy tests in covered jurisdictions. Together these measures opened the franchise to millions of Black voters who had been excluded for generations.

The amendment is one in a series of voting-rights amendments that includes the Fifteenth, the Nineteenth, and the Twenty-Sixth, each removing a barrier to participation. Naturalization candidates should know the Twenty-Fourth Amendment as the constitutional ban on poll taxes in federal elections.