Republicans Brought Back the "Poll Tax" in Georgia?

[stepnw1f]

I just heard a caller on Malloy's show say they brought back the Poll Tax.:nuke:

[ulysses]

1. effectively, yes. n/t

[Rainscents]

2. What's poll tax?

[stepnw1f]

5. Poll tax

A poll tax, head tax, or capitation is a tax of a uniform, fixed amount per individual (as opposed to a percentage of income). Such taxes were important sources of revenue for many countries into the 19th century, but this is no longer the case. There are several famous cases of poll taxes in history, notably a tax formerly required for voting in parts of the United States that was often designed to disenfranchise African Americans, Native Americans, and whites of non-British descent, as well as two taxes levied by John of Gaunt and Margaret Thatcher in the fourteenth and twentieth centuries respectively.

The word poll is an English word that once meant "head", hence the name poll tax for a per-person tax. However, in the United States, the term has come to be used almost exclusively for a fixed tax applied to voting. Since "going to the polls" is a common idiom for voting (deriving, of course, from the fact that early voting involved head-counts), a new folk etymology has supplanted any knowledge of the phrase's true origins in America.

The jizya is a poll tax that, according to Islamic law, Islamic states must take from adult non-Muslim males.


United States

The capitation clause of Article I of the United States Constitution, requiring apportionment among the states of "direct taxes", makes imposition of a poll tax by the federal government unfeasible.

However, states sometimes made payment of a poll tax a pre-condition of the exercise of the right to vote. After the right to vote was extended to all races by the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment, many Southern states enacted poll tax laws which often included a grandfather clause that allowed any adult male whose father or grandfather had voted to vote without paying the tax. These laws achieved the desired effect of disenfranchising African and Native Americans, as well as whites of non-British descent.

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. A 1966 Supreme Court decision held that the poll tax as applied to state elections violated the equal protection clause of United States Constitution. Currently no state imposes a poll tax.

[wildeyed]

6. A poll tax was one of the ways they kept black people from

voting back in the day.

I guess Diebold is not working well enough, so they are going back to more low tech voter disenfranchisement techniques, just to make sure they have all the bases covered.

[agincourt]

3. In Nebraska there are some,

shitto-monkeys who want people to get a vote for each grand they pay in taxes. I don't think it'll go through though.

[wildeyed]

4. Yes, they are requiring that all voters have a state issued picture ID.

ID costs $35 according to the GA DMV website.

We should kick a huge fuss over this IMO.