# Did the poll tax prevent poor whites from voting? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 12, 2009, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160 "2009-05-12T13:52:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![joebuck20](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/74df32/32.png) [@joebuck20](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/joebuck20)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 1:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/1 "2009-05-12T13:52:02Z")
One of the tactics used by white southerners in the Jim Crow era to keep blacks from voting was the poll tax, the reasoning being that poor blacks wouldn’t be able to afford it. But did the poll tax also prevent poor white people from voting? Or was it the sort of thing where if a white person tried registering, the clerk (or whoever processed the registration form) would find some loophole or just not bother to collect the tax at all? Also, how much was the typical poll tax? ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 2:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/2 "2009-05-12T14:04:50Z")
Texas still had a poll tax when the 24th Amendment was introduced (can’t remember if they repealed it before ratification.) I believe it was $1 for each election, payable at the poll. That may not sound like much now, but if your entire income came from sharecropping, that could mean the choice between voting and eating. And yes, if you were a poor white, there were ways around it, just like the voter literacy tests where whites could spell “cat” while blacks had to spell “chrysanthemum.” ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 2:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/3 "2009-05-12T14:14:15Z")
Cite? ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/4 "2009-05-12T14:27:10Z")
Isn’t this where the term grandfathered in came from? If your grandfather voted in the past, you were exempt from the tax. Obviously the grandson of a slave wouldn’t be exempt. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/5 "2009-05-12T14:58:30Z")
> [@Liberal](#): > > Cite? [Here you go](http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6582/), except according to the article, the tax was $1.75 per year. In fact, it says here that Texas never did get around to ratifying the 24th Amendment, and didn’t formally repeal its poll tax until [last week](http://blogs.chron.com/texaspolitics/archives/2009/05/texas_finally_s.html)! And this article talks about some of the ways [various politicians got around the poll tax](http://newdeal.feri.org/survey/40a01.htm). ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/6 "2009-05-12T15:34:55Z")
> [@](#): > > And this article talks about some of the ways various politicians got around the poll tax. Some details I hadn’t know were that you had to pay the tax months before the election itself so you didn’t even know who the candidates were going to be when you paid. And that you had to pay it for every election to be eligible to vote so if you skipped one election you couldn’t vote in the next election unless you paid your back taxes. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/7 "2009-05-12T15:55:57Z")
> [@kunilou](#): > > [Here you go](http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6582/), except according to the article, the tax was $1.75 per year. In fact, it says here that Texas never did get around to ratifying the 24th Amendment, and didn’t formally repeal its poll tax until [last week](http://blogs.chron.com/texaspolitics/archives/2009/05/texas_finally_s.html)! > > And this article talks about some of the ways [various politicians got around the poll tax](http://newdeal.feri.org/survey/40a01.htm). Your links (assuming their accuracy) did indeed expound upon how wealthy white politicians found ways around the poll tax (e.g., by buying extra “tickets” in bulk and passing them out to people of their choice). But the claim made in your previous post, “And yes, if you were a poor white, there were ways around it…”, while not saying so outright, implied that the poor whites themselves engineered ways around the poll tax. And that just didn’t happen. There are pockets of poor whites, particularly in Appalachia, that are almost unreachable by anyone, including politicians, in a literal sense of being so backwoods that nobody knows they’re there. The have no electricity or plumbing, and so they’re not traceable by utility bills or anything like that. They are as poor, and their conditions are as horrible, as any in the South Bronx or South Central Los Angeles. They are illiterate, and couldn’t even spell “cat”. Forgive this niggling point, but it is a pet peeve of mine that a lot of the people who squatted on former Cherokee land are now unmercifully poor. This does not make me happy, and in fact, I do get a bit annoyed when they’re ignored in discussions of race or class struggles. ---
**Author:** ![Keeve](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f07891/32.png) [@Keeve](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Keeve)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/8 "2009-05-12T16:05:24Z")
> [@hajario](#): > > Isn’t this where the term grandfathered in came from? If your grandfather voted in the past, you were exempt from the tax. Obviously the grandson of a slave wouldn’t be exempt. Correct! From [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause): > [@](#): > > The term originated in late-19th-century legislation and constitutional amendments passed by a number of U.S. Southern states which created new restrictions on voting. It allowed men to vote, even if they did not meet new requirements, based on their having ancestors who had the right to vote before the Civil War – effectively limiting the exemption to white men. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/9 "2009-05-12T16:29:09Z")
> [@Keeve](#): > > Correct! From [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause): […sigh…] I don’t mean to be a party pooper here or anything, but Wikipedia cites another encyclopedia as its source for that. That’s not up to their usual standards of requiring the citing of an original work. ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/10 "2009-05-12T16:45:53Z")
> [@Liberal](#): > > […sigh…] I don’t mean to be a party pooper here or anything, but Wikipedia cites another encyclopedia as its source for that. That’s not up to their usual standards of requiring the citing of an original work. What? It’s very common for Wikipedia to cite other encyclopedias, both general ones and specialised. There’s no requirement that sources have done “original” research (in the sense used by Wikipedia) – just that Wikipedia articles themselves should not be the results of “original” research. ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 6:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/11 "2009-05-12T18:30:15Z")
> [@Liberal](#): > > […sigh…] I don’t mean to be a party pooper here or anything, but Wikipedia cites another encyclopedia as its source for that. That’s not up to their usual standards of requiring the citing of an original work. Do you have evidence that the origin of the term or the tactic is incorrect? ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/12 "2009-05-12T18:46:22Z")
> [@Liberal](#): > > There are pockets of poor whites, particularly in Appalachia, that are almost unreachable by anyone, including politicians, in a literal sense of being so backwoods that nobody knows they’re there. The stories of the old days of vote buying in West Virginia are legendary. The price of a vote was usually one dollar and a shot of whiskey. The so called “dollar and a swaller” I can’t understand the need for Texas to do this other than to bow to political correctness. I don’t see anything inherently evil about a poll tax per se (just the rationale behind that particular type of poll tax). Hell, we are taxed for every other service we used and are indirectly taxed to pay for the polling locations. It may be bad public policy, but it is certainly not bad in and of itself. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/13 "2009-05-12T20:26:12Z")
> [@Liberal](#): > > Your links (assuming their accuracy) did indeed expound upon how wealthy white politicians found ways around the poll tax (e.g., by buying extra “tickets” in bulk and passing them out to people of their choice). But the claim made in your previous post, “And yes, if you were a poor white, there were ways around it…”, while not saying so outright, implied that the poor whites themselves engineered ways around the poll tax. And that just didn’t happen. > > There are pockets of poor whites, particularly in Appalachia, that are almost unreachable by anyone, including politicians, in a literal sense of being so backwoods that nobody knows they’re there. The have no electricity or plumbing, and so they’re not traceable by utility bills or anything like that. They are as poor, and their conditions are as horrible, as any in the South Bronx or South Central Los Angeles. > > They are illiterate, and couldn’t even spell “cat”. Forgive this niggling point, but it is a pet peeve of mine that a lot of the people who squatted on former Cherokee land are now unmercifully poor. This does not make me happy, and in fact, I do get a bit annoyed when they’re ignored in discussions of race or class struggles. Please reread my post. I did not claim that poor whites engineered ways around the poll tax. I simply said, and my cites support, that there were ways for poor whites to vote without having to pay the poll tax. True, they may have depended on the suffrance of a politician, but it’s different from the “white only” party primaries that existed in some states. As for not being able to spell “cat” – the reference was to an [old joke](http://books.google.com/books?id=OCSD1h1BISYC&pg=PA128&lpg=PA128&dq=joke+%22spell+chrysanthemum%22&source=bl&ots=dBUZLyosUM&sig=tiQ8A7JHAqMx08BeVqy8NsR1LaU&hl=en&ei=I9gJSqW4NommM_OxhdoL&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3). And **jtgain** , at what point does a tax on voting become “bad in and of itself”? $1.75 per year? How about $100,000 per year? Somewhere in the middle? ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 8:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/14 "2009-05-12T20:29:23Z")
Didn’t the poll tax amount depend on your age too? I remember reading that in one state (Florida?) the poll tax was calculated for men based on the number of years since they turned 21 and for women is was based on the number of years since 1920 if they came of age before getting the vote. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/15 "2009-05-12T21:25:07Z")
> [@kunilou](#): > > Please reread my post. I did not claim that poor whites engineered ways around the poll tax. Okay, I did reread yours. Now please reread mine. I didn’t say that you said that. I said that it could be infered from what you wrote. > [@](#): > > I simply said, and my cites support, that there were ways for poor whites to vote without having to pay the poll tax. True, they may have depended on the suffrance of a politician, but it’s different from the “white only” party primaries that existed in some states. You’re talking about two different things there. The poll tax clearly hurt both blacks and whites who were poor, and helped politicians who could buy votes from people who were either black or white. With all due respect to your cites, according to a paper hosted by the [University of Michigan](http://www.umich.edu/~lawrace/disenfranchise1.htm), while black disenfranchisement from poll taxes might have been as high as half, white disenfranchisement from the same tax might have been as high as 28%, which ain’t just hay. Plenty of whites were poor. White Primaries (especially in Texas) were a real problem in the sense that it took half a dozen Supreme Court rulings before the federal government would enforce the law. And finally, literacy tests with their grandfathered clauses were fairly quickly discarded by most states because they forced the states to report high illiteracy rates, which only increased federal interference in the states’ affairs. (Incidentally, Voting Rights Act of 1965 abolished literacy tests in the South, but they were not abolished nationwide unril 1970.) ---
**Author:** ![Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a587f6/32.png) [@Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freddy_the_Pig)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/16 "2009-05-12T22:03:08Z")
Poll taxes and grandfather clauses are often misunderstood. A poll tax is just a capitation tax or a “head tax”, and has no necessary connection with suffrage. Many Southern states began to levy them under biracial Republican Reconstruction, when they were one of the few ways to spread the tax base more widely in order to establish public school systems. After the restoration of white supremacy, the governing white Democratic Parties instituted the policy of _disenfranchising people who failed to pay their poll tax_, which converted it into a de facto pay-to-vote mechanism. Everybody was theoretically responsible for paying a poll tax, but no effort was made to collect. You had to pay voluntarily. If you didn’t pay and then showed up to vote, you were told you were tax delinquent and thus disenfranchised. There is no question that disenfranchisement of poll tax delinquents suppressed poor white as well as poor black voting. In theory there were more ways in which a white person could beat the tax–say, by finding a sponsor, or getting a wink and nod from a friendly registrar–but the process was inherently degrading and many poor people didn’t bother. The other two pillars of white political supremacy were literacy tests and the white primary. Literacy tests were controversial when they were enacted, since even-handed enforcement would disenfranchise many whites as well as a majority of blacks. To soften the blow, “grandfather exemptions” were added, for a limited period of time, saying that anybody who could prove to the satisfaction of a registrar that his grandfather had voted could register without passing the test. Only a microscopic minority of African Americans (those of mixed race with white male ancestry) could gain this exemption. The exemptions expired after a period of years, limiting the opportunity for a federal court challenge. Even after the grandfather clauses expired, literacy tests were often administered in a discriminatory manner. But again, the mere erection of voting barriers served to suppress poor white turnout. Many whites were too embarrassed to admit their illiteracy and beg a registrar for mercy. This disappointed the white political establishments in the Southern states not in the slightest, since a small and relatively affluent all-white electorate served to minimize pressure on incumbent politicians. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/17 "2009-05-12T22:04:28Z")
**Liberal** we seem to be on the same general side of the issue here (poll tax=bad) but, really, I never said or implied that poor white voters weren’t impacted by the poll tax. So in the interest of keeping this truly informative GQ post, which discusses a seamy part of our democracy that is usually underserved by history books, from being punted over to GD, I am offering to revise my original statement: [QUOTE= old, imprecise me] And yes, if you were a poor white, there were ways around it, just like the voter literacy tests where whites could spell “cat” while blacks had to spell “chrysanthemum.” [/QUOTE] Into something like: [QUOTE=new, improved more precise me] And yes, if you were a poor white, there were ways around it, if a politician wanted your vote. [/QUOTE] ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/18 "2009-05-12T22:44:43Z")
Just to add to the general knowledge, the grandfather clause was found unconstitutional in 1915, in Guinn v US. The law that was found unconstitutional was an Oklahoma law that said: > [@](#): > > No person shall be registered as an elector of this state or be allowed to vote in any election held herein, unless he be able to read and write any section of the Constitution of the state of Oklahoma; but no person who was, on January 1, 1866, or any time prior thereto, entitled to vote under any form of government, or who at that time resided in some foreign nation, and no lineal descendant of such person, shall be denied the right to register and vote because of his inability to so read and write sections of such Constitution. Precinct election inspectors having in charge the registration of electors shall enforce the provisions of this section at the time of registration, provided registration be required. Should registration be dispensed with, the provisions of this section shall be enforced by the precinct election officers when electors apply for ballots to vote. The states that the case affected; those states that had “grandfather clauses” exempting people from literacy tests of one sort or another were Oklahoma, Maryland, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Virginia. It was the first case in which the NAACP particpated. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [May 12, 2009, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/19 "2009-05-12T23:05:14Z")
> [@kunilou](#): > > **Liberal** we seem to be on the same general side of the issue here (poll tax=bad) but, really, I never said or implied that poor white voters weren’t impacted by the poll tax. Okay, then. Please take my apology for having dwelt on the matter. I’m not white, but I have learned that there are two kinds of bigotry: (1) selectiong on the basis of race (or other factor); and (2) refusing to select simply because of race (or other factor). A person should, in general, be discriminating in the ordinary sense of the word. But he shouldn’t select one group about which to lament just because they’re Latino, while deselecting another group about which not to lament just because they’re not. You know, that sort of thing. Again, please take apology of old Cherokee man. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2009, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160/20 "2009-05-13T00:43:35Z")
So what about the idea of making failure to pay a poll tax a felony. Then depriving convicted felons the right to vote? [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-the-poll-tax-prevent-poor-whites-from-voting/496160.md?page=2)