How to Use poll tax in a Sentence

poll tax

noun
Definition of poll taxnext
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  • The poll tax was used for decades to keep poor people, white and Black, from voting.
    — Mike Cason | [email protected], 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 | [email protected], 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 | [email protected], 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 | [email protected], 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

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'poll tax.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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