One of two legal strategies used by Southerners to keep black people and poor whites from voting. (See literacy tests.) When a person registered to vote, he or she became eligible to pay a local poll tax. The poll tax was outlawed in 1964 by the 24th Amendment to the Constitution. Some states, North and South, continued to use a poll tax after 1964, claiming that it wasn't really a tax on voters, but eventually the tax was seen for what it was and abandoned everywhere.