tuscaloosa, ala. <u+2014> many people, of all partisan stripes, are still wondering, <u+201c>how did this happen?<u+201d> the fact is that a very small difference in net votes <u+2014> around 100,000 votes in michigan, pennsylvania and wisconsin <u+2014> would have turned hillary clinton<u+2019>s popular vote victory into an electoral college victory as well. as people try to process what happened on election day, we need to consider carefully whether the difficulty of voting in our nation<u+2019>s urban centers, in places like detroit, milwaukee and philadelphia, might have played a decisive role. this isn<u+2019>t merely idle speculation. professors charles stewart iii, of m.i.t., and stephen ansolabehere, of harvard, estimate that long lines at the polls discouraged between 500,000 and 700,000 would-be voters from casting ballots in the 2012 general election. this year, long lines, some of them a half-mile long in cincinnati, snaked outside too many urban polling places. in brooklyn, some voters had to wait almost three hours to vote because of unreliable voting machines. this is hardly a new problem; reports of excessive waiting times to vote also arose in the 2004, 2008 and 2012 general elections. however, this is probably the first presidential election in which discouraged nonvoters might have determined the outcome. no citizen should have to wait for hours to exercise the fundamental right to vote; would-be voters shouldn<u+2019>t be forced to choose between significant lost work time (and hence pay) and voting. yet this is precisely the choice confronting a significant number of urban voters. the investment of time required to vote clearly constitutes a significant disincentive to voting <u+2014> a kind of modern-day poll tax. the fact that it seems to happen more often in urban and lower-income areas only underlines the need for a strong federal response. it<u+2019>s difficult to know with confidence whether shorter wait times in urban precincts in michigan, pennsylvania, and wisconsin would have resulted in a different president-elect. in part, this is because, as the government accountability office has found, 78 percent of jurisdictions don<u+2019>t even bother to collect data on waiting times. even with the limited data available, however, the g.a.o. found that the polling places with the longest reported waiting times are mostly located in urban locations with <u+201c>higher proportions of residents who are non-white and speak english as a second language.<u+201d> for me, this is personal. my 72-year-old father lives and votes in a predominantly african-american precinct in moss point, miss. although he knew that his vote would probably not make a difference, he waited for over an hour in a line stretching down the block. but how many people made a different choice on tuesday? for many of them, it was not even a real choice. as between voting and paying the rent, many citizens were simply unable to spend an hour or more queuing to vote. the outcome of a presidential election should not potentially turn on votes not cast out of a combination of frustration and economic necessity. we amended the constitution to abolish poll taxes for federal elections in 1964, and two years later the supreme court extended this principle to state and local elections. <u+201c>voter qualifications have no relation to wealth nor to paying or not paying this or any other tax,<u+201d> the court ruled. when a voter has to wait in line for hours in order to vote, that<u+2019>s effectively a form of poll tax. in an ideal world, congress would establish a maximum mean wait time for voting in federal elections and require all jurisdictions to meet the national standard. moreover, the wait times within a given jurisdiction should be more or less equal. alternatively, given bush v. gore<u+2019>s application of equal-protection principles to counting votes, it would be possible for the federal courts, as a matter of equal-protection doctrine, to force states to reduce the gross disparities in the time required to vote. if a state does not want to open more precincts or use more voting machines in high-population precincts to equalize wait times, it could follow the lead of states like colorado, oregon and washington, all of which use vote-by-mail systems that reduce the temporal poll tax to zero. at the very least, one person, one vote means that in a participatory democracy, the temporal burden of voting should be evenly distributed among all citizens. in the united states today, it is not. ronald j. krotoszynski jr. is a professor of law at the university of alabama. follow the new york times opinion section on facebook and twitter (@nytopinion) , and sign up for the opinion today newsletter .
a poll tax by another name
ronald j. krotoszynski jr.