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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.
A leaflet explaining the Community Charge (the so-called "poll tax"), Department of the Environment, April 1989. The Community Charge, commonly known as the poll tax, was a system of local taxation introduced by Margaret Thatcher's government whereby each taxpayer was taxed the same fixed sum (a "poll tax" or "head tax"), with the precise amount being set by each local authority.
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.
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Poll taxes disenfranchised Mexican Americans because their low wages made payment of the tax a hardship. [158] Lulu B. White, president of the Houston chapter of the NAACP in the 1930s and state director of the organization in the 1940s, worked for anti-poll tax initiatives and held rallies against poll taxes, as part of her civil rights platform.
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 ...