Reject the modern-day poll tax.

Jami Nakamura Lin
Written By Nicole Cardoza

Yesterday was National Voter Registration Day. And today there are still millions of people who can't vote in the U.S. this upcoming election. As part of our ongoing series on covering various forms of voter suppression, today we're analyzing how the modern-day poll tax disincentivizes people to vote.

Today's article – written by Jami – centers the voter disenfranchisement in Florida and the work of the FRRC. If you can do one thing today, share their work using the action items below.

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TAKE ACTION

  • Donate to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition’s We Got the Vote fund. 100% of these tax-deductible donations will help returning citizens pay their court fines so they can vote and fully participate in their communities.

  • Listen to Voting Rights for Returning Citizens episode of The Returning Citizen podcast, which explains the issue in a national context.

  • Read through the ACLU Florida’s collection of actions to fight racism and white supremacy in the state. Choose one or more to participate in.

GET EDUCATED

By Jami Nakamura Lin (she/her)

On Friday, September 11th, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld SB 7066, Florida’s law requiring returning citizens to pay off their court debts before being able to register to vote (NPR). (The term returning citizen refers to people with prior convictions, in this case felony convictions specifically.) The law blocks almost 800,000 potential voters, a disproportionate number of whom are Black (The Guardian). In other words, it’s a poll tax—a fee one must pay in order to vote—and like the Jim Crow era poll taxes, it’s specifically designed to suppress the votes of low-income and Black citizens. But here in 2020, the poll tax is back again. 

That this is happening in Florida is relevant. Florida is not only a swing state, but also considered one of the presidential race’s primary battlegrounds (FiveThirtyEight). It also has a history of poll taxes (Richmond University). People convicted of felonies were not allowed to vote until Floridians overwhelmingly passed a referendum restoring those voting rights in 2018, enfranchising 1.4 million people (NYTimes), including one in every five Black adults (Sentencing Project). In a swing state, 1.4 million potential votes matter a lot; in 2012, Obama beat Romney in Florida by just 74,000 votes—an 0.88% margin (St. Augustine Record). 

Just eight months after these voting rights were restored, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed the new law requiring payment of court debts (Washington Post). This was a way to again disenfranchise the same population without explicitly saying so, as 774,000 of those 1.4 million owe debt, according to a University of Florida report (Courthouse News).

This May, a federal judge determined that DeSantis’s law was unconstitutional, but now the 11th Circuit Court has overturned that decision, making it valid again. Florida’s system also makes it difficult to know how much these potential voters owe, or how much they’ve already paid, as Slate outlines. The case could wind its way to the Supreme Court, but that takes time, and the Florida voter registration deadline is October 4th. For this presidential election, the damage is done. 

The poll tax as we understand it now developed in response to the 15th Amendment, added in 1870, which stated “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” (National Archive/Our Documents). The idea that Black Americans—including formerly enslaved people— could vote did not go over well with many people in power.

 

“After the 1870s, particularly in the southern states, there was an effort to restrict any kind of political power for African Americans,” William Pretzer, the curator of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, told Smithsonian. “There was great concern on the part of the white power structure that this was a revolution in their lives.”

In response, white legislators enacted voter suppression laws that included required literacy tests (as we discussed in a previous newsletter) and poll taxes, which effectively blocked not only Black Americans, but also Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and other people of color whose growing numbers struck fear into the white political elite. In Texas, voters were required to pay around $1.50 ($30 in 2020 dollars) to vote, unless they were covered by a “grandfather clause” which exempted anyone who could vote before the Civil War (or whose ancestors could vote) from paying the tax (African American Policy Forum). As only white men could vote before the Civil War, this meant that only the descendents of white men were exempt from paying the tax. (The law also disenfranchised poor white immigrants who came to America after the war.) Similar laws were enacted across all the former Confederate states (Smithsonian). Thus the Southern political elite ensured that while the federal law might give Black voters the vote in theory, the state poll tax still forbade it in practice, consolidating power amongst the wealthy white. 

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 24th Amendment, which abolished the poll tax and guaranteed American citizens the right to vote regardless of wealth (National Archives). “There can be no one too poor to vote,” he said; everyone deserved the “freedom to vote without bans or barriers” (NYTimes). 


And yet Florida’s law clearly shows that there are still people too poor to vote. At least three-fourths of people convicted of felonies in Florida owe the courts money, and most of them cannot pay it (NYTimes). Often, the word “felony” can call up images of murder, but driving three times with a suspended license is a felony in Florida, while murderers are explicitly excluded from the voting law. Instead, in a racist state with a history of overpolicing and overconvicting Black communities (ACLU Florida), the law is, again, a way to block poor people and Black people from voting while not expressly saying so. Like those Jim Crow voting laws, Florida’s law is a smokescreen. It is unconstitutional. It is voter suppression. Support the work of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition and donate to their We Got the Vote fund to support the cause and help returning citizens vote.

Key Takeaways

  • Florida’s law SB 7066 suppresses the vote of returning citizens (people with prior felony convictions) by requiring them to pay off their court debts first. SB 7066 affects around 774,000 people, a disproportionate number of whom are Black (The Guardian).

  • This law follows in the footsteps of the Jim Crow-era poll taxes, which effectively blocked Black voters and other voters of color.

  • The 24th Amendment (passed in 1964) abolished the poll tax and was supposed to ensure that anyone could vote regardless of wealth. But the overwhelming majority of those affected by SB 7066 do not have the means to pay their debts (NPR).

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Nicole Cardoza
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