Twenty-Fourth Amendment

Originalist note

Ratified in 1964, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment postdates the founding by over a century and a half, so none of the wiki's founding-era sources speak to it. Property and tax qualifications for voting were common and constitutionally unremarkable at the founding — the original Constitution left voter qualifications almost entirely to the states (Art. I sec. 2 cl. 1) — so the Amendment's abolition of the poll tax as a federal-election qualification is a deliberate textual departure from, not a restoration of, the founding-era baseline.

gap

No founding-era source in the wiki addresses poll taxes as a voting qualification; the Amendment's own 1939-1964 legislative history is the relevant originalist anchor.

Modern doctrine (Annotated Constitution)

Overview and Ratification History (Amdt24.1)

Ratification of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment in 1964 marked the culmination of an endeavor begun in Congress in 1939 to eliminate the poll tax as a qualification for voting in federal elections. Property qualifications extend back to colonial days, but the poll tax itself as a voting qualification was instituted in eleven states of the South following the end of Reconstruction, although at the time of the Amendment's ratification only five states still retained it. Congress viewed the qualification as "an obstacle to the proper exercise of a citizen's franchise" and expected its removal to "provide a more direct approach to participation by more of the people in their government." Congress thought a constitutional amendment necessary because the poll-tax qualification had previously survived constitutional challenge on several grounds — including the challenge rejected in Breedlove v. Suttles (1937).

Enforcement and Anti-Evasion Doctrine (Amdt24.2)

Not long after ratification — the Amendment applies only to federal elections — Congress by statute authorized the Attorney General to seek injunctive relief against use of the poll tax as a means of racial discrimination in state elections, and the Supreme Court held in Harper v. Virginia State Bd. of Elections (1966) that the poll tax discriminated on the basis of wealth in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, extending the ban to state elections as well.

In Harman v. Forssenius (1965), the Court struck down a Virginia statute that eliminated the poll tax as an absolute qualification for voting in federal elections but gave federal voters the choice either of paying the tax or of filing a certificate of residence six months before the election. Viewing the residence-certificate requirement as an onerous burden not imposed on those who continued to pay the tax, the Court unanimously held the law conflicted with the new Amendment "by penalizing those who chose to exercise a right guaranteed them by the Amendment."