24th Amendment

U.S. Constitution of 1787


24th Amendment

#
US Constitution Amendment
Proposal Date
Enacted Date
24th
Prohibits voting rights revocation due to the non-payment of poll taxes - Signers: Speaker of the House John William McCormack (MA-D)& US Senator Carl Trumbull Hayden (D-AZ)
September  14, 1962
January 23,1964

The Twenty-fourth Amendment prohibits both the United States Congress and the fifty states from making the right to vote in federal elections conditional on payment of a poll or other type of tax. The amendment was proposed by Congress to the states on August 27, 1962, and was approved by the states on January 23, 1964.

Poll taxes appeared in southern states after Reconstruction as a measure to prevent African Americans from voting, and were held to be constitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1937 decision Breedlove v. Suttles. In 1964, the year of this amendment's passage, five states still retained a poll tax: Virginia, Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi. The amendment made the poll tax unconstitutional in regards to federal elections. However, it was not until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966) that poll taxes for state elections were unconstitutional because they violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Section 1. 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.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.


The Twenty-fourth Amendment was finally sent to the states for ratification at the behest of President John F. Kennedy, who brought the issue back into public consciousness in 1962. Kennedy considered the constitutional amendment the best way to avoid a filibuster, as the claim that federal abolition of the poll tax was unconstitutional would be moot. Ratification of the amendment took only slightly more than a year, however, as it was rapidly ratified by state legislatures across the country from August 1962 to January 1964. President Johnson called the amendment a "triumph of liberty over restriction" and "a verification of people's rights."   Only one state, Mississippi, rejected the amendment outright on December 20, 1962. 





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