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Property qualifications limited voting rights to property owners, often excluding women and people of color. Some nations assigned voting weight based on the amount of property owned. Restrictions were gradually lifted in the 19th century, and today most countries offer universal suffrage. National election laws prohibit property qualifications, and other restrictions can be addressed to protect universal suffrage.
Property qualifications are restrictions on voting rights that limit suffrage to people who own property. Such restrictions were used extensively in many countries around the world until the 1800s, when a number of Western democracies began abolishing limits on voting rights. Some populations continued to be excluded from voting well into the early 20th century. Today, most of the world’s nations offer universal suffrage to all citizens of a certain age, with some exceptions; some offenders and people with severe intellectual disabilities from voting.
Some nations that historically used ownership qualifications did not just restrict the right to vote to owners. They also assigned the grade in relation to the amount of property people owned. Thus, people who owned larger tracts of land had more weight in elections. This was especially common with elections for regional offices such as city or town council members. Large landowners in a district could therefore have a large impact on the electoral process.
Property qualifications limited voting rights to people with the most power in society. Nations with such restrictions also usually barred women and people of color from voting, which meant that those who held full-fledged property still could not exercise full civil rights. Justifications for this practice varied; in the early United States, for example, it was argued that since the only taxes in existence were on property, landlords were the only taxpayers with the right to contribute to the electoral process to determine how their money was spent.
Changes in social and cultural views on voting in the 19th century led to a gradual relaxation of restrictions on voting rights. Property qualifications were some of the first restrictions to be lifted in many democracies. Regions such as individual U.S. states have extended the right to vote to all white men of legal age. Black people were barred from voting in some regions even if they owned property, and women of all races were among the last to gain suffrage in many nations.
National election laws may specifically prohibit the use of property qualifications to ensure that individual jurisdictions cannot limit voting rights in this way. Many national governments recognize this as an unreasonable restriction on suffrage because people who do not own property still participate in society and are influenced by government policies. Other suffrage restrictions such as literacy tests and poll taxes can be addressed in voting policy with the goal of protecting universal suffrage.
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