Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution
Twenty-fourth Amendment is formally certified
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The amendment was already part of the Constitution when the White House ceremony began. This date supplied the certificate, not the decisive vote.
9:30 a.m. in the Cabinet Room
On 4 February 1964, General Services Administrator Bernard L. Boutin signed the certificate formally recording adoption of the Twenty-fourth Amendment, in the White House Cabinet Room.
The certificate declared that legislatures in the requisite three-fourths of the states had ratified the amendment and that it was valid as part of the Constitution.
President Lyndon B. Johnson witnessed the signing, added his own signature as a witness, and spoke about the abolition of the poll tax in federal elections. He was the first president to attend such a certification.
The decisive vote was in Pierre, eleven days earlier
Ratification had already been completed on 23 January, when South Dakota became the thirty-eighth approving state of fifty. South Dakota and Georgia had raced for that position.
The listing's framing — that the federal government authorized the amendment on 4 February — inverts the mechanism. State legislatures adopted it; Boutin recorded that they had.
Johnson was a witness, not the certifying official, and neither he nor the certificate was the source of the amendment's validity.
Federal ballots only
The amendment's text reached primaries and elections for president, vice president, presidential electors, senators and representatives. It did not immediately outlaw poll taxes in state and local elections.
Five states still imposed poll taxes at ratification: Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia.
Voters in those states could find one set of rules for the federal ballot and another for state and local contests; the Supreme Court reached state poll taxes only in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections in 1966.
Sources
Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited
How this was checked
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What the sources leave uncertain
- February 4 is unquestionably the certification date. January 23—not February 4—is the date on which ratification was completed and the amendment became part of the Constitution.
Checked against
- Constitution Annotated: Post-War Amendments and ratification record
- Federal Register certification of the Twenty-fourth Amendment
- Lyndon Johnson's remarks upon witnessing certification
- Library of Congress: The Poll Tax—Twenty-fourth Amendment Ratified
- Constitution Annotated: Doctrine on Abolition of Poll Tax
- Constitution Annotated: Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections