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A poll tax is a tax of a fixed sum on every liable individual (typically every adult), without reference to income or resources. Various privileges of citizenship, including voter registration or issuance of driving licenses and resident hunting and fishing licenses, were conditioned on payment of poll taxes to encourage the collection of this tax revenue.
Poll taxes are regressive, meaning the higher someone's income is, the lower the tax is as a proportion of income: for example, a $100 tax on an income of $10,000 is a 1% tax rate, while $100 tax on a $500 income is 20%. Its acceptance or "neutrality" depends on the balance between the tax demanded and the resources of the population.
To increase this revenue, poll taxes were also frequently extended to the process of obtaining hunting, fishing, and driving licenses. [4] Poll taxes were a prerequisite to voting registration in many states. Often, legislatures required the tax to be paid on a day separate from the polls.
Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-Va.) defended Democrats’ opposition to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, calling it a “modern poll tax” in an interview on NewsNation’s “The ...
The survey was conducted after the New York Times published a series of blockbuster stories last month that showed President Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the ...
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History of the poll tax by state from 1868 to 1966. Southern states had adopted the poll tax as a requirement for voting as part of a series of laws in the late 19th century intended to exclude black Americans from politics so far as practicable without violating the Fifteenth Amendment. This required that voting not be limited by "race, color ...
The poll tax mechanism varied on a state-by-state basis; in Alabama, the poll tax was cumulative, meaning that a man had to pay all poll taxes due from the age of twenty-one onward in order to vote. In other states, poll taxes had to be paid for several years before being eligible to vote. Enforcement of poll tax laws was patchy.