OF MISSISSIPPI NOT BEING AMENDMENTS OF PREVIOUS SECTIONS"; these were later renumbered as 145A and 149A and placed under the article related to the judiciary. Criticisms The Mississippi Constitution has faced various criticisms since its inception in 1890. Disenfranchisement The 1890 convention considered the portions of its new constitution that instituted literacy tests and poll taxes as being the most important. Indeed, the implementation of these measures was the reason for the convention's very existence. The portion of the 1890 constitution that would specifically allow the state to prevent black voters from casting ballots was Article 12's Section 244, which required that after January 1, 1892, any potential voter prove that they were literate. One method to determine their literacy was for the voter to describe, to a registrar, a "reasonable interpretation" of the state constitution. This was one form of the state's literacy tests, in which the constitution mandated that voters be "literate". Sample questions to determine "literacy" were made intentionally and overtly confusing and vague when applied to African Americans, such as questions inquiring as to the exact number of bubbles in a bar of soap. The exact wording of Article 12's Section 244, from its enactment in November 1890 to its repeal in December 1975, was as follows: Although the wording of the 1890 constitution itself regarding voting was not explicitly discriminatory, the desired intent of the 1890 constitution's framers was that a state registrar, who would be white and politically appointed by Democrats, would deny any potential African American voter from being enrolled by rejecting their answers to a literacy test as erroneous, regardless of whether or not it actually was. The 1890 constitution also imposed a two dollar poll tax for male voters, to take effect after January 1, 1892. After legal challenges to these laws survived U.S. judicial review, such as in 1898's Williams v. Mississippi, thanks to their race-neutral language, other Southern U.S. states, such as South Carolina in 1895, and Oklahoma by 1907, emulated this method to disenfranchise their black voter base, known as "The Mississippi Plan", in which a law's seemingly un-discriminatory and vague wording would be applied in an arbitrary, subjective and discriminatory manner by the authorities charged with enforcing them. Despite the 1890 constitution's seemingly un-discriminatory wording on the surface on the subject of voting, Mississippi governor James K. Vardaman, a staunch Democrat, boasted about its enabling of the