How to Use poll tax in a Sentence

poll tax

noun

• The poll tax was used for decades to keep poor people, white and Black, from voting.
  — Mike Cason | [e-mail], al, 31 July 2022
• This was still the Virginia of the poll tax and of segregated schools.
  — Drew Gilpin Faust, The Atlantic, 18 July 2019
• If the poll tax didn’t get you, the literacy test would.
  — Sanya Mansoor, Time, 26 Mar. 2021
• If Jim Crow politicians had gotten their way, the poll tax would still be in place.
  — David Litt, Time, 18 June 2020
• There are a lot of felons in Florida who could use the money to pay that state's new poll tax.
  — Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter, 16 Oct. 2019
• There might as well have been a poll tax or jelly-bean test for Black voters in Pleasant Grove.
  — Roy S. Johnson | [e-mail], al, 27 Aug. 2020
• But Texas is not, say, a voter who has wrongly been subjected to a poll tax.
  — Amy Davidson Sorkin, The New Yorker, 12 Dec. 2020
• Or pass a voter ID law that one federal judge compared to a poll tax.
  — Cristian Farias, Daily Intelligencer, 25 June 2018
• The nominal reason for the Peasant Revolt was the announcement of a third poll tax in 15 years.
  — Susan Wade, The Conversation, 5 June 2020
• In the morning the negro who started the riot appeared at the polls and was refused a vote because of non-payment of poll tax.
  — Roger Simmons, orlandosentinel.com, 29 Oct. 2020
• The Warren Court and the civil-rights movement swept away poll taxes and literacy tests in the 1960s.
  — Matt Ford, The New Republic, 19 July 2019
• Opponents equate the law to to a modern-day poll tax, requiring a segment of the population to pay for the right to vote.
  — Karina Elwood, sun-sentinel.com, 14 Aug. 2020
• That process echoes mechanisms like poll taxes that were used to racially curate voter rolls in the Deep South.
  — Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker, 3 July 2019
• In 1964, the poll tax was abolished by Constitutional amendment, and Texas’s Plan B kicked in.
  — David Litt, Time, 18 June 2020
• In the aftermath of Reconstruction, southern states used poll taxes to deny poor black and white men the vote.
  — Time Staff, Time, 26 Sep. 2017
• The law, Chief Judge William Pryor wrote in the majority opinion, doesn't constitute a poll tax.
  — Christina Maxouris, CNN, 15 Oct. 2020
• Texas, a Southern state at the epicenter of slavery and segregation, still remained one of the last five states to require a poll tax.
  — Shelby Stewart, Houston Chronicle, 18 Aug. 2020
• Some states said passage of the 19th Amendment came too late in the year for women to register for the November election or pay a special fee called a poll tax.
  — Marylou Tousignant, Washington Post, 17 Aug. 2020
• Starting around 1900, states found workarounds to the law, enacting poll tax laws and literacy tests as means of restricting the Black vote.
  — Rick Jervis, USA TODAY, 3 Feb. 2020
• Their lawsuit claims that denying the right to vote to those who can’t afford to pay fees, fines and restitution amounts to a poll tax, which violates the U.S. Constitution.
  — Washington Post, 6 Nov. 2019
• In the April election, anyone who was sending a ballot back through the mail had to include a first-class stamp, which led to some criticism that the city effectively had a poll tax.
  — Devin Kelly, Anchorage Daily News, 28 Apr. 2018
• Instead of celebrating this racial progress, Democrats play the race card by claiming the GOP wants to restore poll taxes and literacy tests.
  — The Editorial Board, WSJ, 7 Jan. 2019
• The right to register to vote without literacy tests, poll taxes and other barriers were key goals of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
  — Lee Roop | [e-mail], al.com, 26 June 2019
• Section 259 is part of Article XIV on education and is the surviving reference to the poll tax.
  — Mike Cason | [e-mail], al, 31 July 2022
• But now the House has passed a ruthless attack on democracy, a poll tax in disguise, an attack on college students, the elderly, minorities, and the poor.
  — Matt Ford, The New Republic, 7 Dec. 2021
• Last year, the Florida legislature said paying fines and fees was part of serving a sentence, critics say the measure is a de facto poll tax.
  — Ellen McGirt, Fortune, 10 Apr. 2020
• But critics say the laws are just modern incarnations of poll taxes, designed to suppress the African American vote.
  — Joseph Williams, The New Republic, 24 Oct. 2019
• Or in March, 1990, when some of the worst rioting in modern British history swept through central London, as thousands of citizens protested the new poll tax.
  — James Wood, The New Yorker, 25 Nov. 2019
• The 24th Amendment, which outlawed the poll tax as a voting requirement in federal elections, had recently been added to the Constitution.
  — Emmett Lindner, New York Times, 25 Dec. 2022
• Philosopher Henry David Thoreau penned his celebrated civil disobedience essay after being jailed for not paying a poll tax that funded the war.
  — Jose R. Gonzalez, The Arizona Republic, 4 Feb. 2023

Last Updated: 1 Aug 2024