24th Amendment

"Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

This is another amendment about voting. It seems to be a critical issues in this country as there are 3 amendments that are connected to the right to vote. This one protects the poor people as they might not be able to pay poll taxes and therefore are held back from voting. This is to me a kind of patronage politics as to keep people who would vote differently away from the ballots.

"Speaking of the Constitution

January 23, 2008 in tdih | by ari

The 24th Amendment was ratified on this date in 1964, making poll taxes illegal in federal elections.
Poll taxes were one way that the states of the former Confederacy circumvented the 15th Amendment. These taxes became common at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Many states included grandfather clauses in their version of the poll tax, allowing people whose parents or grandparents had voted to do so as well. In this way, the taxes disfranchised African-Americans while allowing whites, with some exceptions, to vote.
The House of Representatives passed five bills banning the poll tax in the 1940s. But each time the measure failed to get through the Senate, where Southerners blocked the legislation. Finally, in 1962, the Senate approved the 24th Amendment. It took two more years for ratification. And when the 24th Amendment went into effect, five Southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia — still had poll taxes on the books. Only in 1966, in the case of Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, did the Supreme Court rule that all poll taxes were unconstitutional."

 Source: http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/speaking-of-the-constitution/

The article shows how it still was able to keep poor black citizens away from voting even after the 15th amendment. In the former slave states this seemed to be a common practice and I hope that it will cease from existence sooner or later to allow everybody not depending on their money to vote.

 

  The New Poll Tax

Ok, there is something in Economics that is called "opportunity costs". This means the costs (not only evaluated in money) that emerge while doing something else. So this report has some kind of thuth in it. Still, it is exagerated.
Nevertheless, it points out that there has to be organizational changes to be made to make voting go faster. Maybe making sunday the voting day- it is in Germany. Many people do not have to work on sundays so there could this pressure be taken away. And maybe one can set up more voting stations, so the rush can be divided up and so kept down to a lower level.