Talk: Universal suffrage
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My knowledge of English, and history in the Anglo-Saxon world, might be the problem, but I get confused by the current definition of Universal suffrage.
I would, according to my prior knowledge and understanding, say that Common suffrage is the extension of voting privileges to all adults, without distinction to race, sex, belief or social status.
At the moment it's the race-issue which is stressed, which doesn't fit with my understanding. Sex and social status were at least as critical, as far as I know. But I must admit that this is grounded on my assembled reading on history, mostly in German, to some degree also in Danish, Swedish and French. I can not now point out any written sources to my support.
Maybe Universal suffrage is something else than Common suffrage?
-- Ruhrjung 16:22 May 5, 2003 (UTC)
From memory, Ruhrjung, "common suffrage" and "adult suffrage" mean the same thing. (But I haven't looked it up lately.) Both are normally used as synonyms for "universal suffrage", which is not strictly correct. The term we should use is "adult suffrage", as most (all?) places deny persons of less than a certain age the vote. (As an aside, I was unable to understand the justice in this when I was a child, and remain equally unable to understand it to this day. But there you are: the world is not always as we should like it to be.) Tannin.
I made a minor rewrite. -- Ruhrjung 15:47 May 7, 2003 (UTC)
This is something different.... Reserving seats for communal groups isn't particularly uncommon, and it's different from denying the right to vote.
Most societies today no longer maintain such provisions, but a few still do. For example, Fiji reserves a certain number of seats in its Parliament for each of its main ethnic groups; these provisions were adopted in order to discriminate against Indians in favour of ethnic Fijians. Pakistan reserves certain seats in parliament for voting by "frontier" tribes.
--- Roadrunner
I have changed the date of universal suffrage in the USA to 1920, that being the date when women gained the right to vote. Let us recall that it was in 1870, five years after the abolition of slavery, that the constitution was amended to provide that neither federal nor state laws could deny the right to vote because of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude". If the fact that in some areas Blacks were systematically illegally denied the right to vote is to be cited as a reason to say that the USA did not grant universal suffrage until 1962, then the degree of enforcement of legal rights in other countries should be closely scrutinized as well. Michael Hardy 18:31, 23 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Universal suffrage -- New Zealand
The chronological entry for New Zealand as granting universal suffrage in 1993 is completely wrong. Adult males were granted the vote irrespective of property qualifications in 1879 and women in 1893. Therefore, depending on how this chronological list defines universal suffrage, New Zealand was the first country in the world to grant universal suffrage to adult men and women in 1893. If anyone else can let me know of another country that predates NZ in this I would be most grateful. john.wilson@parliament.govt.nz
Ambiguity in the listing
It's unclear as to whether the years given in the chronological listing are the ones when the countries granted Universal suffrage or when they revoked it. The opening line in the section is causing this confusion.
-- Sundar 04:14, Apr 15, 2004 (UTC)
Candidacy
Does the term universal suffrage also include equal right to stand as a candidate in general elections? 130.232.129.242 15:14, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)
