Twenty-Fourth Amendment
Voting Rights Expansion · A narrow text with an outsized real-world effect
Ratified in 1964, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment bars poll taxes as a condition for voting in federal elections — a fee that had been used for decades, particularly in Southern states, as one of several tools to suppress Black voter turnout without naming race directly.
The right of citizens of the United States to vote…shall not be denied or abridged…by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.
Twenty-Fourth Amendment, ratified 1964
The text
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.
Spelling and punctuation as transcribed by the National Archives.
A Deliberately Narrow Text
State and local elections weren’t covered by the text itself
The amendment’s text specifically covers elections for federal offices — President, Vice President, and members of Congress. It took a separate 1966 Supreme Court ruling to extend the same poll-tax ban to state and local elections, reasoning from the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment rather than this amendment’s own text.
Poll taxes weren’t struck down everywhere at once
A common misconception is that ratification in 1964 immediately ended poll taxes nationwide. The amendment’s own text only reached federal elections; a handful of states continued charging poll taxes for state and local elections until the 1966 Supreme Court decision closed that remaining gap — a real, two-step process, not one clean constitutional moment.