Legislation
The Representation of the People Act 1969 extended suffrage to 18-year-olds, the first democratic nation to lower its age of franchise to include this age group. [1] [3] [4] Previously, only those aged over 21 were permitted to vote.
Section 12 of the act allowed candidates to include on the ballot paper, alongside their name, a six-word description including party or other political affiliation. Previously, the "description" mandated by the Ballot Act 1872 was presumed to indicate profession, occupation, or social rank; political descriptions were deprecated, and definitively prohibited by the Representation of the People Act 1948. [5] The 1969 act did not empower returning officers to challenge the accuracy of the description. [6] The provision (restated in 1983) was exploited by spoiler candidates using descriptions confusingly close to those of major parties; notoriously, the Liberal Democrat candidate lost a 1994 Euro election when Richard Huggett took votes running as a "Literal Democrat". [7] The Registration of Political Parties Act 1998 dealt with this problem by creating a register of political parties. [8]
In local government elections, the act abolished plural voting, except in the City of London. [9] [10]
Aftereffects
The first election affected by this change of law was the Bridgwater by-election held on 13 March 1970 after the death of the sitting MP. [11] The next general election was on 18 June 1970.
Case law subsequently established the right for undergraduate students to vote in the constituency of their university. [12] This followed an appeal to the High Court. [13]
The approach to the challenge of radical youth culture taken by the UK political establishment, which primarily involved strategies of co-option and compromise, was able to stymie much of the rising social and political tension that convulsed some other liberal democracies in 1968 through to the early 1970s. [1] [2]
The 1969 act, sometimes known as the Sixth Reform Act, [11] [14] [15] did not extend the right to stand as a candidate for election to Parliament to under-21s. The age of candidacy for elections in the United Kingdom was lowered from 21 to 18 in 2006, with the passing of the Electoral Administration Act 2006. [16]
The Representation of the People Act 1983 was in part a consolidation act which repealed the 1969 act but restated many of its provisions.
The Representation of the People Act 1832 was an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom that introduced major changes to the electoral system of England and Wales. It reapportioned constituencies to address the unequal distribution of seats and expanded franchise by broadening and standardising the property qualifications to vote. Only qualifying men were able to vote; the Act introduced the first explicit statutory bar to women voting by defining a voter as a male person.
Suffrage, political franchise, or simply franchise is the right to vote in public, political elections and referendums. In some languages, and occasionally in English, the right to vote is called active suffrage, as distinct from passive suffrage, which is the right to stand for election. The combination of active and passive suffrage is sometimes called full suffrage.
The 1970 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 18 June 1970. It resulted in a surprise victory for the Conservative Party under leader Edward Heath, which defeated the governing Labour Party under Prime Minister Harold Wilson. The Liberal Party, under its new leader Jeremy Thorpe, lost half its seats. The Conservatives, including the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), secured a majority of 30 seats. This general election was the first in which people could vote from the age of 18, after passage of the Representation of the People Act the previous year, and the first UK election where party, and not just candidate names were allowed to be put on the ballots.
Universal suffrage or universal franchise ensures the right to vote for as many people bound by a government's laws as possible, as supported by the "one person, one vote" principle. For many, the term universal suffrage assumes the exclusion of the young and non-citizens. At the same time, some insist that more inclusion is needed before suffrage can be truly universal. 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. Universal full suffrage includes both the right to vote, also called active suffrage, and the right to be elected, also called passive suffrage.
The Reform Acts are legislation enacted in the United Kingdom in the 19th and 20th century to enfranchise new groups of voters and to redistribute seats in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. When short titles were introduced for these acts, they were usually Representation of the People Act.
The Electoral Reform Society (ERS) is an independent campaigning organisation based in the United Kingdom which promotes electoral reform. It seeks to replace first-past-the-post voting with proportional representation, advocating the single transferable vote, and replacing the House of Lords. It is the world's oldest operating organisation concerned with political and electoral reform.
The Representation of the People Act 1867, known as the Reform Act 1867 or the Second Reform Act, is an act of the British Parliament that enfranchised part of the urban male working class in England and Wales for the first time. It took effect in stages over the next two years, culminating in full commencement on 1 January 1869.
A voting age in law is a minimum age established by law that a person is allowed to vote in a democracy.
An electoral roll is a compilation that lists persons who are entitled to vote for particular elections in a particular jurisdiction. The list is usually broken down by electoral districts, and is primarily prepared to assist election officials at polling places. Most jurisdictions maintain permanent electoral rolls, which are updated continuously or periodically, while some jurisdictions compile new electoral rolls before each election. Electoral rolls are the result of a process of voter registration. In most jurisdictions, voter registration is a prerequisite for voting at an election. Some jurisdictions do not require voter registration, and do not use electoral rolls, such as the state of North Dakota in the United States. In those jurisdictions a voter must provide identification and proof of entitlement to vote before being permitted to vote.
The Representation of the People Act 1918 was an act of Parliament passed to reform the electoral system in Great Britain and Ireland. It is sometimes known as the Fourth Reform Act. The Act extended the franchise in parliamentary elections, also known as the right to vote, to men aged over 21, whether or not they owned property, and to women aged over 30 who resided in the constituency whilst occupying land or premises with a rateable value above £5, or whose husbands did. At the same time, it extended the local government franchise to include women aged over 30 on the same terms as men. It came into effect at the 1918 general election.
Representation of the People Act is a stock short title used in Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, India, Jamaica, Mauritius, Pakistan, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom and Vanuatu for legislation dealing with the electoral system. Representation of the People Acts is a collective title for legislation relating to representation of the people, including Rating Acts and other Registration Acts. The title was first used in the United Kingdom in the 1832 Great Reform Act and was adopted in other countries of, or formerly part of, the British Empire through the spread of the Westminster parliamentary system.
In the United Kingdom, a member of Parliament (MP) is an individual elected to serve in the House of Commons, the lower house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
Electors must be on the electoral register in order to vote in elections and referendums in the UK. Electoral registration officers within local authorities have a duty to compile and maintain accurate electoral registers.
A movement to fight for women's right to vote in the United Kingdom finally succeeded through acts of Parliament in 1918 and 1928. It became a national movement in the Victorian era. Women were not explicitly banned from voting in Great Britain until the Reform Act 1832 and the Municipal Corporations Act 1835. In 1872 the fight for women's suffrage became a national movement with the formation of the National Society for Women's Suffrage and later the more influential National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). As well as in England, women's suffrage movements in Wales, Scotland and other parts of the United Kingdom gained momentum. The movements shifted sentiments in favour of woman suffrage by 1906. It was at this point that the militant campaign began with the formation of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).
Richard Henry Tizard was a distinguished engineer and founding Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Michael Steed was a British psephologist, political scientist, broadcaster, activist and Liberal Democrat politician. He wrote extensively on political parties and elections.
Electoral reform is a change in electoral systems which alters how public desires are expressed in election results.
The constitution of the United Kingdom comprises the written and unwritten arrangements that establish the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a political body. Unlike in most countries, no official attempt has been made to codify such arrangements into a single document, thus it is known as an uncodified constitution. This enables the constitution to be easily changed as no provisions are formally entrenched.
There are five types of elections in the United Kingdom: elections to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, elections to devolved parliaments and assemblies, local elections, mayoral elections, and police and crime commissioner elections. Within each of those categories, there may also be by-elections. Elections are held on Election Day, which is conventionally a Thursday, and under the provisions of the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022 the timing of general elections can be held at the discretion of the prime minister during any five-year period. All other types of elections are held after fixed periods, though early elections to the devolved assemblies and parliaments can occur in certain situations. The five electoral systems used are: the single member plurality system (first-past-the-post), the multi-member plurality, the single transferable vote, the additional member system, and the supplementary vote.
