In November 1963, Evelyn Butts, a seamstress and mother of three from Norfolk, Virginia,filed the first lawsuit in federal court challenging her state’s $1.50 poll tax. Annie Harper, a retired domestic worker from Fairfax County, filed a companion suit five months later. In March 1966, the Supreme Court overruled two previous decisions and overturned Virginia’s poll tax, stating that economic status could not be an obstacle to casting a ballot. “Fee payments or wealth, like race, creed, or color, are unrelated to the citizen’s ability to participate intelligently in the electoral process,” wrote Justice William Douglas in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections. “We conclude that a State violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment whenever it makes the affluence of the voter or payment of any fee an electoral standard.”
Six years later, in Bullock v. Carter, the Supreme Court held that economic status could not be the primary impediment for those seeking elected office, striking down a system of filing fees in Texas that charged prospective candidates up to $8,900 to place their name on the ballot. “We would ignore reality,” wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger, “were we not to recognize that this system falls with unequal weight on voters, as well as candidates, according to their economic status.”
But in the decades after the Harper and Bullock decisions, the skyrocketing cost of political campaigns emerged as a new type of poll tax, with the wealthy so dominating the political process as to erode the value of everyone else’s vote. “The wealth primary impermissibly uses access to wealth as both an obstacle to meaningful political candidacy for nonaffluent citizens and as a proxy for political seriousness,” Jamie Raskin and John Bonifaz wrote in the Yale Law & Policy Review in 1993. “In so doing, it systematically degrades the influence of poor and working people in the political process.”
Full Article: How the Money Primary Is Undermining Voting Rights | The Nation.