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Voter disenfranchisement is when a government (local, state, or federal) puts in place some sort of technicality that prevents people from being able to vote. So even though you should be able to vote, there is some restriction that makes it so that you can't.

A major example was the poll tax. After the Civil War, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution freed all slaves; then the 15th Amendment granted them the right to vote. However people, especially (but not exclusively) in the South passed laws saying that you needed to pay a fee before you could register to vote. Since the newly freed black slaves were usually poor, they could not afford to pay the fee, so they could not vote. To make matters worse, these laws usually included a "grandfather clause"- if your grandfather had voted before, then you were exempt from the fee. Since slaves were not allowed to vote, freed slaves didn't have grandfathers who had voted, so the exemption did not apply to them.

Poll taxes were officially outlawed in the US by the 24th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1964.

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