Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution

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The Twenty-fourth Amendment (Amendment XXIV) of the United States Constitution prohibits both Congress and the states from requiring the payment of a poll tax or any other tax to vote in federal elections. The amendment was proposed by Congress to the states on August 27, 1962, and was ratified by the states on January 23, 1964.

Southern states of the former Confederate States of America adopted poll taxes both in their state laws and in their state constitutions throughout the late-19th and early-20th centuries. This became more widespread as the Democratic Party regained control of most levels of government in the South in the decades after Reconstruction. The purpose of poll taxes was to prevent African Americans, poor whites, (and also women following passage of the Nineteenth Amendment), from voting. Use of the poll tax by states was held to be constitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1937 case Breedlove v. Suttles.

When the 24th Amendment was ratified in 1964, five states still retained a poll tax: Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia. The amendment prohibited a poll tax for voters in federal elections, but it was not until 1966 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections that poll taxes for any level of elections were unconstitutional. It stated that these violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Subsequent litigation related to potential discriminatory effects of voter registration requirements has generally been based on application of this clause.