THE INVISIBLE POLL TAX

Does anybody today remember the poll tax? It was an iniquitous device of the Jim Crow South, requiring people to pay a tax for the privilege of voting. The amount of money involved was usually enough to put the vote beyond the purchasing power of most poor people and almost all African-Americans in the South. The Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified in 1964, outlawed the use of this tax (or any other tax) as a pre-condition in voting in Federal elections. The 1966 Supreme Court case Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections held that the poll tax as applied to state elections violated the equal protection clause of United States Constitution.

But careful examination of voter demographics in the US and in other Western industrial countries tells us that poor people are a good deal less likely to vote in the US than elsewhere. Is there some obvious factor that could account for that difference, now that the official poll tax has been abolished? Well, yes, I think there is. In every other industrial country in the world (and, so far as I know, almost all of the other countries that have elections at all) elections are held on a non-working day, usually a Sunday. (Iraq's latest election was held on a Saturday.) In this country, elections are ALWAYS on a Tuesday. Which means that people in the lowest tier of the job market, who typically get no paid time off for any reason, have to take unpaid time off from work to do it. Losing money for the privilege of voting is--let's be blunt about it--a poll tax. The mere fact that government doesn't collect the money is beside the point. The effect is the same, and is, I suspect, intended to be the same. This has the makings of a really interesting lawsuit.