Universal suffrage

Universal suffrage is the principle that adult citizens may vote without exclusions based on characteristics such as wealth, sex, or race.

Chartism: A British working-class movement that campaigned for political reforms, including votes for nearly all adult men. Its People's Charter made broad male suffrage a central demand in nineteenth-century Britain.
Voting age: The minimum age at which a person is legally allowed to vote. Universal suffrage applies to adults, but laws define when adulthood grants electoral eligibility.
Census suffrage: A voting system that grants the franchise only to people meeting a property or tax threshold. It makes wealth a formal qualification, unlike universal suffrage.
Democracy: A system of government in which political authority is grounded in the people, directly or through representatives. Broad suffrage is a defining feature of modern representative democracy.
Women's suffrage: The campaign to secure voting rights for women. It challenged the exclusion of women from the principle of universal adult suffrage.
Citizenship: A legal status establishing membership in a political community and its associated rights and duties. Many states reserve national voting rights for citizens, limiting suffrage by legal membership.
Restricted suffrage: A voting system that excludes people from the franchise through legal eligibility rules. It names the broader alternative in which voting rights depend on selected qualifications.
Voter turnout: The proportion of eligible voters who cast ballots in an election. Expanding eligibility changes who can participate, while turnout measures who actually does.
Abolition of property qualifications: The removal of rules requiring voters to own property or meet wealth thresholds. Ending property tests widened voting rights beyond propertied citizens.
Voter registration: The process by which eligible people are entered on an official list of voters. Registration rules can make formal voting rights easier or harder to exercise.

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