Texas' poll tax in disguise

[struggle4progress]

Posted on Tuesday, July 17, 2012

By BRUCE ACKERMAN AND JENNIFER NOU | Los Angeles Times

In 1964, the American people enacted the 24th Amendment, to prevent the exclusion of the poor from the ballot box. In his speech last week at the NAACP convention, U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. wasn't indulging in election-year rhetoric when he condemned Texas' 2011 voter photo identification law as a poll tax that could do just that. He was speaking the hard legal truth.

The Justice Department would be right to challenge this new law as an unconstitutional poll tax. The department has temporarily blocked the Texas law under special provisions of the Voting Rights Act that prevent states with a history of discrimination from disadvantaging minority groups. But the attorney general should go further and raise a 24th Amendment challenge against Texas and other states that are joining the effort to bar the poor from the polls. This exclusionary campaign should not be allowed to destroy a great constitutional achievement of the civil rights revolution.

The 24th Amendment forbids the imposition of "any poll tax or other tax" in federal elections. Texas' law flatly violates this provision in dealing with would-be voters who don't have a state-issued photo ID. To obtain an acceptable substitute, they must travel to a driver's license office and submit appropriate documents, along with their fingerprints, to establish their qualifications. If they don't have the required papers, they must pay $22 for a copy of their birth certificate.

If they can't come up with the money for the qualifying documents, they can't vote. But the 24th Amendment denies states the power to create such a financial barrier to the ballot box ...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/07/17/156439/texas-poll-tax-in-disguise.html

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/07/17/156439/texas-poll-tax-in-disguise.html#storylink=cpy

[TEDxmember]

1. Poll tax

This is deeply true.

A mere fig leaf.

[Igel]

2. Lots of things could be considered a "poll tax" if this is.

Ignoring, first and foremost, that a poll tax was a tax that everybody had to pay and the argument here is that just a remarkably few people to pay this particular poll tax. It was, after all, a poll tax and not a "polls tax". Even the numbers cited are just upper bounds, with a lot of people "disenfranchised" actually registered to vote.

The poll tax was also, in many places, instituted for the purposes of disenfranchisement and, apart from being a remarkably regressive way of raising revenue, served no other purpose.

I find I use my ID for a lot of things. Why, today I needed it for writing a check.

The easy way out of this is for means testing birth-certificate fees for the next few months.

An even better way out of it is for TX to sort through all the software disasters that afflicted--it would seem--upgrading the DPS (which is what we call the DMV) and reopen, at least several days a week, the county offices they closed a couple of years back.