...the U.S. Constitution although Brits have loved it:
U.S. Constitution: Twenty-Fourth Amendment
Twenty-Fourth Amendment - Abolition of the Poll Tax Qualification in Federal Elections Amendment Text | Annotations
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.
Annotations
Expansion of the Right to Vote
Ratification of the Twenty-fourth Amendment marked the culmination of an endeavor begun in Congress in 1939 to effect elimination of the poll tax as a qualification for voting in federal elections. Property qualifications extend back to colonial days, but the poll tax itself as a qualification was instituted in eleven States of the South following the end of Reconstruction, although at the time of the ratification of this Amendment only five States still retained it. 1 Congress viewed the qualification as ''an obstacle to the proper exercise of a citizen's franchise'' and expected its removal to ''provide a more direct approach to participation by more of the people in their government.'' Congress similarly thought a constitutional amendment necessary, 2 inasmuch as the qualifications had previously escaped constitutional challenge on several grounds. 3 However, not long after ratification of the Amendment Congress by statute had impuned the continuing validity of the poll tax as a qualification in state elections 4 and the Supreme Court had voided it as a violation of the equal protection clause. 5
In Harman v. Forssenius, 6 the Court struck down a Virginia statute which eliminated the poll tax as an absolute qualification for voting in federal elections and gave federal voters the choice either of paying the tax or of filing a certificate of residence six months before the election. Viewing the latter requirement as imposing upon voters in federal elections an onerous procedural requirement which was not imposed on those who continued to pay the tax, the Court unanimously held the law to conflict with the new Amendment by penalizing those who chose to exercise a right guaranteed them by the Amendment.
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A poll tax, head tax, or capitation is a tax of a uniform, fixed amount per individual (as opposed to a percentage of income). When a corvée is commuted for cash payment, in effect it becomes a poll tax (and vice versa, if a poll tax obligation can be worked off). Such taxes were important sources of revenue for many governments from ancient times into the 19th century, but are not any more. 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 poor people, including 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 14th and 20th 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 from the fact that early voting involved head-counts), a new folk etymology has supplanted common knowledge of the phrase's true origins in America. <MORE>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax
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