The Twenty-Fourth Amendment

XXIV

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.

This is another one that I thought of treating with other amendments. It relates to the Reconstruction Amendments (13, 14, and 15), and yet part of the need for the 24th amendment is that after the Reconstruction Amendments a poll tax was one method used to keep the newly enfranchised from exercising it.

It also could go with some of the other amendments we treated together recently (19, 23, and 26), as different groups were given the right to vote, and yet the poll tax has also been used against poor white men, who previously always had the vote.

And so we return to that Section 2, and its many friends. We know that the nature of men will constantly work on new ways to strip the rights from others, and we must continually be on guard, via new legislation and enforcement of existing legislation, to keep the vote safe for all.