What was eliminated by the 24th amendment

Section 1. In , African American citizens of Virginia had hope that the recently passed Voting Rights Act would finally guarantee them the right to vote. Literacy tests were now illegal, and the Twenty-fourth Amendment had eliminated the poll tax as a voting requirement. Virginia was one of the last five states to maintain the poll tax as late as But the Virginia legislature had anticipated the amendment.

The legislature eliminated the poll tax as a prerequisite to voting in federal elections, but it introduced a requirement that voters either pay the customary poll tax or file a certificate of residence six months before the election. Filing a certificate was cumbersome and time-consuming. Disgruntled citizens filed two class action suits against this complicated and discriminatory procedure, claiming that the statute violated the Fourteenth, Seventeenth, and Twenty-fourth Amendments.

The courts were on their side. In Harman v. Forssenius , the U. Supreme Court found the Virginia statute to be in violation of the Twenty-fourth Amendment. Before the Twenty-fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court and other federal courts upheld poll taxes as the right of the states to impose, so long as they applied to all citizens equally.

The Court sought to remove the threat of complex legislative schemes established to disenfranchise certain voters. Although the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited voting discrimination on account of race, many southern states enacted laws to make it difficult for African Americans to vote.

The Twenty-fourth Amendment was designed to address one particular injustice, the poll tax. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment was ratified to address barriers which specifically prevent the poor from voting, after Post-Reconstruction politicians erected poll taxes as an end-run around universal enfranchisement.

Today, costs associated with complying with burdensome voting requirements push voters into an untenable choice: pay a price they cannot afford to vote, or not vote at all. This Note challenges existing case law to argue that modern-day poll taxes should be impermissible under the Twenty-Fourth Amendment. 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.

Poll taxes are regularly imposed until , when the Supreme Court reverses itself in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections. Blog Post Battle for the Constitution: Week of September 27th, Roundup Here is a round-up of the latest from the Battle for the Constitution: a special project on the constitutional debates in…. Educational Video Voting Rights Amendments Advanced Level In this session, students learn about voting rights in America through a historical exploration of the right to vote in America.