The Virginia law had given voters in federal elections the choice of either paying the tax or of filing a certificate of residence six months before the election. Forssenius, the Supreme Court struck down a Virginia law which had partially eliminated the poll tax as an absolute qualification for voting in federal elections. Finally, in the 1965 opinion in the case of Harman v. Even with the ratification of the Twenty-fourth Amendment, some states continued to look for ways to use poll taxes as an impediment to blacks’ exercising their right to vote. Despite Congressional sentiment, though, a constitutional amendment was necessary to abolish poll taxes, as the poll tax had previously withstood constitutional challenges in the courts.
Congress eventually came to view the financial qualification as an impediment to individuals’ suffrage rights. The voting rights of poor blacks were disproportionately discriminated against in this method. The poll tax was a flat fee required before voting it was often levied as high as $200 per person. However, the poll tax was instituted in seven southern states following Reconstruction.
Qualifications to vote based on some element of property ownership have a history that extends to colonial days. The poll tax, as it applied to primary elections leading to general elections for federal office, was abolished in the Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified in 1964. Such measures as the poll tax, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and the white primary proved especially effective in disfranchising blacks.
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These tactics caused registration by blacks to drop significantly. They used violence, vote fraud, gerrymandering, literacy tests, white primaries, among others. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, southern states employed a range of tactics to prevent blacks from exercising their right to vote.
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