Voting history: Poll taxes were an actual thing back then
History, sad to say, is forgotten by too many people. For me, it’s a fascinating subject that makes me yearn for a time machine. If only I could return to this year or that year, I often think, to see history up close and personal.
With my luck, someone will invent such a machine, maybe Elon Musk, who knows, the year after I die, and it will be too late to enjoy the fun. Of course, there is always the paradox of time. What if Musk accidentally kills my great, great, great, great grandfather while on one of his time-travel adventures?
My ancestral roots include men who fought for both the north and the south in the Civil War. I often think, I’m at least glad neither killed the other.
It was my dad’s side of the family vs. my mother’s side of the family, so to speak, which is, I guess, a fitting tribute to their short, stormy relationship.
History, though, came up recently when I was discussing local politics with a friend. Sure, I knew what a poll tax was — one had to pay money to vote — but I never considered how much money it cost.
For those who, for whatever reason, may not know this part of history, some states used to use a poll tax to stifle the vote, or at least help control who voted. The poor were the hardest hit. Black, brown, white, didn’t matter, if you were poor, the chances of having enough money to vote wasn’t good. Not only that, but if the poor voted in large number, they might actually vote for someone championing their cause – better lighting in the poor parts of town, etc., sidewalks.
Actually, justification for the poll tax was that the money would be used to fund civic projects for the lower class, but you can guess how that probably worked out. Not well.
Lasted Until 1966
The poll tax was abolished at the federal level (federal elections) in 1964 when the U.S. Congress ratified the 24th amendment, but Texas wasn’t having any of that and continued allowing the poll tax for local and state elections until 1966.
People with means had little problem paying the poll tax, but I was talking to two guys the other day who would have been about 18 or 19 in ’66, and they were both working local elections at the time, a family tradition of sorts. They still remember what the local poll tax was in the mid-1960s -- $7.
If you use an inflation calculator and plug in that dollar amount and year, in today’s dollars, that amounts to approximately $67. Just to vote.
In the old days, the big boss men would gather some workers, from a processing plant or a field, and tell them that they were going to pay their poll tax, but this is how they wanted them to vote. Of course, then they could also vote for another candidate they might like, so it was a winwin on some level. Still, the poll tax was all about control, using money, or the lack of it, as a tool.
If you were sitting around in 1966 thinking about the upcoming local election, you’d have to figure that you’d have to work about eight hours just to earn the $7 to pay the poll tax, because the average pay back then for low-skilled workers in the RGV was less than $1 per hour.
Not only that, but just to add some intimidation and inconvenience to the cost of the poll tax, some local politicos would set up the poll-tax locations (where it was paid) at either out-ofthe- way places or the local PD.
In one way, elections have changed — no poll tax — and yet, in another way, nothing has changed: money still controls politics. Yet, what’s the answer? In China, there are no elections decided by the public at large.