Anyway you slice it, requiring people to invest so much time to cast their vote amounts to a poll tax pure and simple.
North Carolina Democrats began passing a flurry of Jim Crow laws in 1899, and new voting restrictions further disenfranchised blacks through a poll tax and literacy test.
The change in law must be publicised, IDs must be given free to any who ask for them (otherwise the law would indeed constitute a poll tax, which is unconstitutional in the context of voting) and workers must be trained.
In an appearance before the NAACP in Houston, the attorney general likened the voter ID law in Texas to a poll tax, the fees once imposed across much of the South that made it impossible for many African Americans to vote.
Lady Hollis warned that changes to the system of paying council tax benefit risked a "poll tax mark two".
"Like the poll tax, it is a big change being forced through too fast and, like the poll tax, there is not a consensus of support behind it, " he concluded.
Prof Miles says the easiest way to think about a "helicopter drop" is as a lump sum temporary tax cut - or a one-off reverse poll tax - financed by new government bonds which are purchased by the Bank of England on the secondary market, but with all interest and redemption payments etc transferred back to the Treasury.
But on a lesser test, namely Labour's ability to hold on to its own natural seats, Mr Blair's prospects are far from bleak unless, of course, he manages a Suez or poll tax of his own.
It was a pattern which Sheridan would repeat many times - serving jail terms for refusing to pay the poll tax and a fine after taking part in blockades at Faslane nuclear submarine base.
The effigy was paraded around the square, which in 1990 was the scene of rioting against a hugely unpopular "poll tax" introduced by Thatcher.
For all that, identity cards are unlikely to turn into a repeat of the poll-tax fiasco.
And Labour's Baroness Hollis of Heigham warned the move risked a "repeat of the poll tax".
In a 2009 poll by the nonprofit Tax Foundation, two-thirds of respondents said they favored estate-tax repeal, even though the tax was levied on only about 5, 500 estates that year.
But when the poll tax - a levy on individuals -- and her "no, no, no" response to Europe frightened her party into dumping her in 1990, they woke up the next morning and felt guilty about what they had done to their one-time heroine.
And although he was at first sympathetic to the hugely controversial "poll tax", he became a strong opponent.
One of her first actions was to introduce the poll tax or community charge, a flat-rate tax for local services which was based on individuals rather than the value of the property in which they lived.
Lord Jenkin told BBC Radio 4's The World at One he was not proud of having "dreamt up" in the 1980s the Community Charge - which became known as the "poll tax" and faced mass protest and a central London riot before being replaced by the Council Tax.
The voting barriers that King and the civil rights movement battled in the 1960s had their historic origins in such 19th century measures as the Mississippi Plan of 1890, in which the state instituted the poll tax as well as the requirement that a voter be able to read or interpret any section of the new Mississippi State Constitution.
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According to a 2008 poll, 62% of Americans believe the government should tax them more heavily.
But the prime minister, it seems, would rather get into the nitty gritty of corporation tax after the Scottish poll, than create a precedent beforehand.
It was a time of great political ferment - the controversy over the poll tax, the splits within the Conservative Party over Europe, the downfall of Margaret Thatcher.
You've got to find a greater consensus than we've got at the moment and poll tax certainly taught us that.
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We switched on poll tax to each individual payment because people were saying a lot of people in a house, a lot of them weren't paying the rates.
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They remember the Poll Tax - and they also know that local taxation raises a relatively low proportion of council funding but provokes a huge degree of voter ire.
Also, 76% of the poll-takers thought that Congress should try and come up with a combination of tax increases to supplement spending cuts, instead of the position taken by some Republicans to keep tax increases off the table.
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Businessman Herman Cain, who has his poll ratings surge in recent weeks, proposes a "9-9-9" tax plan that would replace the current code with a 9% income tax, business tax, and a national sales tax.
Now, he says the poll tax riots seem less significant after violence at last year's G20 summit left a man dead.
He said he joined the Labour Party "to make a difference", but by 1989 he had been expelled for his high-profile stance against the poll tax.
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After the Conservative tax proposals, however, he quickly backed off, as Labour's poll numbers had taken a sudden turn for the worse.
At second reading Labour's John Healey, a former local government minister, described the legislation as the "most fundamental change in local government funding since the poll tax".
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