Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1966

Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections

383 U.S. 663 | 86 S. Ct. 1079 | 16 L. Ed. 2d 169 | 1966 U.S. LEXIS 2905

Full access

Unlock the video and quiz

The written brief is free to read below. Subscribe to watch the video explainer and take the quiz.

Create an account Log in

Takeaway

In short, Harper made voting a right that States may not condition on wealth or payment of a fee, invalidating state poll taxes under the Equal Protection Clause.

Background

Virginia required residents to pay an annual poll tax of up to $1.50 as a condition of voting in state elections. A prospective voter had to have personally paid all poll taxes assessed during the preceding three years, and payment had to be made at least six months before the relevant election. The tax was nominally imposed on residents generally, but nonpayment resulted in disenfranchisement rather than ordinary tax collection.

Virginia residents challenged the requirement as unconstitutional. A three-judge federal district court dismissed the complaints because it regarded the Court's earlier decision in Breedlove v. Suttles as controlling. The Supreme Court noted probable jurisdiction, consolidated the appeals, and reversed.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the Equal Protection Clause permits a State to condition eligibility to vote in state elections on payment of a poll tax or other fee.

Holding

No. Once a State grants the franchise, the Fourteenth Amendment forbids it from making wealth, affluence, or payment of a fee an electoral qualification.

Reasoning

Although the Constitution does not expressly confer a general right to vote in state elections, a State that establishes an electorate must administer the franchise consistently with the Equal Protection Clause. States may impose nondiscriminatory voting qualifications, but they may not draw lines that invidiously discriminate among otherwise qualified voters.

The Court distinguished Lassiter v. Northampton Election Board, which had upheld a facially neutral literacy test. Literacy could bear some relation to the State's asserted interest in intelligent use of the ballot, whereas wealth and payment of a tax bear no relation to a person's capacity to participate intelligently in the electoral process.

Voting is a fundamental political right because it preserves other civil and political rights. The Court's prior voting-rights decisions had rejected voter classifications based on such irrelevant factors as occupation, homesite, or military status; by the same principle, a voter is no more or less qualified because the voter has $1.50 to pay a fee.

The State's ability to charge fees for licenses such as driving licenses did not justify a charge for voting. In the voting context, the State's authority is limited to establishing genuine voter qualifications, and wealth, like race, creed, or color, is not germane to that inquiry. Conditioning access to the ballot on a fee therefore creates an invidious discrimination, regardless of the small amount demanded.

The Court rejected the view that equal-protection analysis must remain fixed to historical practices or earlier understandings of equality. When a classification burdens a fundamental right, it must be closely scrutinized; under that scrutiny, a financial barrier to the ballot could not stand. The judgment rested on the Equal Protection Clause rather than on the wisdom of tax policy.

Issue #2

Whether Breedlove v. Suttles remained valid insofar as it upheld a poll tax as a prerequisite to voting.

Holding

No. Breedlove was overruled to the extent that it approved use of a poll tax as a condition of exercising the franchise.

Reasoning

Breedlove had treated a poll tax as a permissible prerequisite to voting. Harper held that this proposition cannot be reconciled with the Equal Protection Clause's prohibition on wealth-based electoral qualifications.

The Court did not invalidate poll taxes as taxes in every setting. A State could levy a poll tax, but it could not use payment of that tax as the price of obtaining a ballot.

Dissents

Justice Black

Reasoning

Justice Black would have adhered to Breedlove and Butler v. Thompson, both of which had sustained poll-tax requirements against substantially similar equal-protection challenges. In his view, the Constitution had not been amended after those decisions, and the Court lacked authority to discard their rule merely because contemporary Justices found poll taxes objectionable.

He argued that equal protection does not forbid every distinction among voters. States have long imposed qualifications based on age, criminal conviction, mental competence, literacy, and, historically, property, so the constitutional question should be whether a classification is irrational, arbitrary, irrelevant, or invidious rather than whether the Court approves of it.

Virginia's requirement could rationally further legitimate state interests, including collecting revenue and encouraging civic responsibility among voters. The record did not establish that the law was being applied as a device for racial discrimination; if it had, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments would have supplied a basis for invalidation.

Justice Black viewed the majority's decision as an impermissible use of equal protection to constitutionalize the Court's own policy preferences, akin to the substantive-due-process approach he had long criticized. Changes to the constitutional balance between state authority and individual rights, he maintained, should come through Article V's amendment process or through Congress's enforcement authority under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Justice Harlan

Reasoning

Justice Harlan, joined by Justice Stewart, accepted that equal protection can reach voter-qualification cases but maintained that the Court had departed from the proper standard for applying the Clause. In his view, the relevant question was whether Virginia's poll-tax classification rested on a rational and otherwise permissible state policy, not whether the Court considered the franchise especially precious or the qualification outdated.

He concluded that Virginia's law easily satisfied rational-basis review. A State could reasonably believe that a modest poll tax would help collect revenue or would identify citizens sufficiently interested in public affairs to make the small payment required for voting. The long historical use of property qualifications and poll taxes also showed that their advisability had been subject to rational political debate.

Justice Harlan emphasized that changing public attitudes had already led most States to abolish poll taxes and had produced the Twenty-Fourth Amendment's ban on them in federal elections. Those political developments showed that legislatures and the amendment process could eliminate an obsolete qualification without judicially declaring all contrary views irrational.

In his view, the majority transformed equal protection into a vehicle for imposing a contemporary egalitarian political theory. The Constitution does not require indiscriminate equality among persons in differing circumstances, and the Court should have affirmed the district court absent racial discrimination or a classification lacking any rational justification.