Universal Suffrage - Expanding Suffrage

Expanding Suffrage

The first movements toward universal suffrage occurred in the early 19th century, and focused on removing property requirements for voting. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the focus of the universal suffrage movement became the removal of restrictions against women having the right to vote.

Several countries which had enacted universal suffrage had their normal legal process,or their existence, interrupted during the first world war.

Many societies in the past have denied people the right to vote on the basis of race or ethnicity. For example, non-white people could not vote in national elections during apartheid-era South Africa, until the system came to an end with the first free multi-party elections in 1994. In the pre-Civil Rights Era American South, African Americans often technically had the right to vote, but various means prevented many of them from exercising that right.