Universal suffrage
[4] Democratic theorists, especially those hoping to achieve more universal suffrage, support presumptive inclusion, where the legal system would protect the voting rights of all subjects unless the government can clearly prove that disenfranchisement is necessary.
[6] In the first modern democracies, governments restricted the vote to those with property and wealth, which almost always meant a minority of the male population.
[11][9] Female suffrage was largely ignored until the latter half of the century, when movements began to thrive; the first of these was in New Zealand, in which all adult women of all ethnicities gained the right to vote in 1893.
[9] Following the French revolutions, movements in the Western world toward more universal suffrage occurred in the early 19th century, and focused on removing property requirements for voting.
In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the focus of the universal suffrage movement came to include the extension of the right to vote to women, as happened from the post-Civil War era in several Western states and during the 1890s in a number of British colonies.
[25][26] Federal states and colonial or autonomous territories prior to World War I have multiple examples of early introduction of universal suffrage.
However, these legal changes were effected with the permission of the British, Russian or other government bodies, which were considered the sovereign nation at the time.
The First French Republic adopted universal male suffrage briefly in 1792; it was one of the first national systems that abolished all property requirements as a prerequisite for allowing men to register and vote.
Upon independence in the 19th century, several Latin-American countries and Liberia in Africa initially extended suffrage to all adult males, but subsequently restricted it based on property requirements.
Despite the amendment, however, blacks were disfranchised in the former Confederate states after 1877; Southern officials ignored the amendment and blocked black citizens from voting through a variety of devices, including poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses;[29] violence and terrorism were used to intimidate some would-be voters.
[29] In 1893 the self-governing colony New Zealand became the first country in the world (except for the short-lived 18th-century Corsican Republic) to grant active universal suffrage by giving women the right to vote.
[31] In 1902, the Commonwealth of Australia became the first country to grant full suffrage for women, i.e. the rights both to vote and to run for office.
[32] However, Australia did not implement universal suffrage at this time – nationwide voting rights for Aboriginal Australians were not established until 1962, before that varying by state.
Many societies in the past have denied or abridged political representation on the basis of race or ethnicity, related to discriminatory ideas about citizenship.
Various other countries and states granted restricted women's suffrage in the later half of the nineteenth century, starting with South Australia in 1861.
After the German Revolution of 1918–19, the Weimar Constitution established universal suffrage in 1919 with a minimum voting age of 20.
In 1902, the new federal parliament legislated for an adult franchise and the right of electors to stand for and occupy any office for which they could directly vote.
The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1962 granted Indigenous Australians the right to vote in federal elections.
Among the constituent states of the Old Swiss Confederacy, universal male suffrage is first attested in Uri in 1231, in Schwyz in 1294, in Unterwalden in 1309, and in Appenzell in 1403.
In these rural communities all men fit for military service were allowed to participate in the Landsgemeinde, which managed political and judicial affairs.
[101][35] All adult men in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland were enfranchised by the Representation of the People Act 1918.
