Never take voting rights for granted

Pres. Lyndon Johnson signed the 24th Amendment abolishing poll taxes in 1964, saying, “There can now be no one too poor to vote. There is no longer a tax on his rights. The only enemy to voting that we face today is indifference.”

The 24th amendment outlawed poll taxes as unconstitutional in federal elections.

New legislation requires in-person documents, evidence of U.S. citizenship, to register—passport, birth certificate, or other citizenship proof.

This burdens the poor and potentially reduces political competition. Ironically, the measure is known as the SAVE Act, Save American Voter Eligibility, yet it’s a voting restriction that possibly stifles American voter eligibility.        Republicans say we need the measure to stop non-citizens from voting. Do non-citizens vote?

Noncitizen voting is rare because only citizens are allowed to vote.

This legislation smells like poll taxes, historically used to suppress competition by keeping groups traditionally allied with certain parties away from the polls—immigrants, blue- or white-collar workers or Black people, poor people, rural people, or city people.

Alliances shape-shift according to circumstances, politics, and events. Such unnecessary “proof” can be expensive and burdensome to procure. Passports cost roughly $195, plus time, money, possibly time off of work, and transportation. A passport card, which can’t be used for international travel, but may serve as a valid ID, and proof of citizenship, costs $30 plus an “execution” fee if applying in person. Such fees especially deprive the poor, often people of color, and immigrants, of the ability to register.

The bill must now pass the U.S. Senate, which hopefully will kill the measure. Here’s another wrinkle: The requirement disproportionally affects women—some 69 million married women may be using a husband’s surname—I kept my birth surname, and now I’m especially glad—because women’s birth certificates, their proof of citizenship, may not match their ID.       

Poll taxes historically were intended to raise money for government, but soon those fixed fees for voting—and this new requirement will “tax” potential voters with the expense required to obtain documents like passports—were used to stifle political competition.

Originally simply a “per-head” tax, to fund government, such taxes were ultimately used, memorably and blatantly, to deprive Black people from voting through Reconstruction. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act’s 24th Amendment abolished the taxes as unconstitutional in federal elections.

In 1966 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled states cannot levy a poll tax as a prerequisite for voting in state and local elections. But with the new SAVE Act, which still needs to pass the U.S. Senate, the term poll tax seems to fit.  Voting rights are always being tested, one way or another.           On July 16, 2020, in a Florida case, the Supreme court failed to upend a lower court move that prevented otherwise eligible citizens with felony records from registering to vote if they could not pay old court fees and fines.

We can never take voting rights for granted.   

Betty Joyce Nash reported for the Greensboro News & Record and the Hendersonville Times-News before moving to Virginia where she worked as an economics writer for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. She co-edited Lock & Load: Armed Fiction, an anthology of literary short stories that probe Americans' complicated relationship to firearms. (University of New Mexico Press, 2017.)