WEEKLY GROSS-OUT: Poll taxes

In 1964, the American people enacted the 24th Amendment, to prevent the exclusion of the poor from the ballot box. In Eric H. Holder Junior's speech last week at the NAACP convention, the U.S. Attorney-General wasn't indulging in election-year rhetoric when he condemned voter photo identification laws in Texas 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. And besides, the whole point of the poll taxes in the first place was to keep as many black people as possible out of the voting booths. But the states can no longer do that because the 24th Amendment forbids the imposition of "any poll tax or other tax" in federal elections. Texas state 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 and 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, and this violation is particularly blatant. In drafting its law, the Legislature rejected a provision that would have provided free copies of the necessary documents. Rather than paying for this service out of the general revenue fund, it chose to disqualify voters who couldn't pay the fee. This is precisely the choice forbidden by the Constitution, and as a result of this, somebody needs to challenge such flawed decision-making.