DEMOCRATS DIGEST. A Monthly Newsletter of the Conference of Young Nigerian Democrats. Inside this Issue:

Transcription

1 DEMOCRATS DIGEST A Monthly Newsletter of the Conference of Young Nigerian Democrats Inside this Issue:

2 Electorate I INTRODUCTION Electorate, term applied to all of the eligible voters in a political democracy. If a substantial majority of the mature citizens of a community are allowed to participate in elections, and if no compulsion or restraint is involved in voting, that community is considered to have a democratic electorate. II HISTORICAL Since the beginning of the 18th century, there has been a struggle to expand the electorate in many countries to include new groups or classes of citizens or subjects. Many criteria have been used throughout history to exclude persons from the electorate, the principal ones including citizenship, property, religion, sex, age, residence, race, education, and class. In Great Britain and the United States, religious criteria were removed by the end of the 19th century. Since then, they have come to be legally eliminated in general. III GENDER Restrictions on the basis of gender were ended in the United States with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, and in Great Britain with enactment of the flapper vote law in Women were enfranchised in Germany under the Weimar Constitution in 1919, and the Soviet Union removed gender restrictions after the Russian Revolution of In Spain, women were enfranchised in 1931, and in Italy and France women won the right to vote after World War II ( ). In Italy and France the participation of women in the wartime resistance movement against the Germans was an important factor in winning the franchise. Full enfranchisement came in Japan in 1946 under United States occupation. IV AGE

3 Until 1971 the age level for voting in the United States was determined by individual states. Although most states had established a minimum voting age of 21, a few had minimum ages as low as 18. In 1971 the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution established the voting age at 18 for federal, state, and local elections. V RACE AND SOCIAL POSITION Race and social position are no longer of importance in the composition of an electorate. In the United States, the 15th Amendment to the constitution, ratified in 1870, prohibited race, color, or previous condition of servitude as grounds for denying or abridging the rights of citizens to vote. Whites, however, found other means of denying African Americans the vote for some time after the amendment was passed, such as poll-taxes or literacy tests. In Germany from 1933 to 1945, under the Nazi regime, membership to the German race was a prerequisite for inclusion in the electorate. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, one had to be a worker to vote. There, any resident worker could vote, whether a citizen or not. VI PROPERTY Historically, property has been a persistent test of admittance into the electorate. The gradual relinquishment of property ownership criteria marked the evolution of the franchise in Great Britain and the United States. The influence of the frontier and the growth of the power of organized labor were important factors in the elimination of property qualifications in the United States. VII POLL TAX AND RESIDENCE. Various countries have employed a poll tax to raise general revenues for the conduct of government and the waging of war, not as a requirement for voting. During its first wave of popularity in the United States, after the American Revolution ( ), the poll

4 tax led to an expanded suffrage by replacing former requirements that voters had to be landowners or members of certain guilds or professions. The payment of a poll tax in a fixed amount was a democratic advance. But in the period from 1890 to 1908, when Democrats resumed control of the legislatures of the South, the poll tax was openly and popularly a device to prevent blacks and carpetbaggers from being a part of the electorate. The poll tax lingered as a prerequisite to voting in five of the southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia) until In that year the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, prohibiting the use of a poll tax payment as a prerequisite for voting in elections for federal offices-president, vice president, senator, and representative. The poll tax was usually linked with other requirements, such as the ability to read and interpret a statute or constitution to the satisfaction of a local election official. In 1966 the Supreme Court of the United States outlawed the poll tax in state and local elections. VIII UNITED STATES CONSTITUTIONAL PROVISIONS Since 1926 the United States has required every voter in every state to be a citizen; however, not all citizens may vote. All citizens, whether born in the United States or naturalized, must attain an age and residence standard and generally must register as a voter in order to be a formal part of the electorate. Even with these conditions met, a person may be disqualified from the electorate for a mental defect or for unlawful conduct, especially if they are convicted of bribery in an election or a felony. Plebiscite Plebiscite, a vote by the electorate of a nation, region, or locality on a specific question. In modern times, plebiscites have been held to determine the wishes of the inhabitants of a country or area as to their choice of sovereignty and have constituted an important

5 political means of self-determination for a number of peoples and nations. The use of plebiscites in this sense originated at the time of the French Revolution, supposedly as an alternative to forcible annexations and wars of conquest. The plebiscites held after 1793, however, in areas including Belgium and the Rhineland, were accompanied by the intimidation of voters in order to assure decisions desired by the French government. As democratic instruments, plebiscites were used after the resurgence of nationalistic sentiments in Europe in They played a prominent role, for example, in the long struggle for the independence and unification of Italy. In 1852 a notable plebiscite was held in France by Napoleon III to give the appearance of popular approval to the coup d'etat by which he had overthrown the republic and established the second empire. In the 20th century, important plebiscites resulted in the separation of Norway from Sweden in 1905 and in the reacquisition of the Saarland by Germany in More recently, they have been used in Africa to learn the preferences of newly independent peoples for their national sovereignty. For more information about the Association Contact: Wole Adedoyin National Coordinator ,