English

Towards a Democratic Franchise

Global Perspectives on Legal History - Volume 20 Towards a Democratic Franchise. Suffrage Reform in the Twentieth-Century Bahamas Stephen B. Aranha The Bahamas is an archipelago of over 700 islands located in the western Atlantic Ocean between the United States of America, Cuba and Hispaniola. It became an English colony in 1648 and enjoyed a form of representative government with an elected Assembly since 1729. It was not until the end of World War I that Bahamians first articulated discontent with colonial rule in general and the undemocratic franchise of the colony in particular. This set in motion a drawn-out process of electoral reform and incremental democratisation of the franchise. The book examines this process starting with the General Assembly Elections Act of 1919, which reaffirmed a franchise limited to propertied men, to the present. Important milestones included the introduction of voting by secret ballot between 1939 and 1946, the company vote between 1946 and 1959, universal adult male suffrage in 1959, women’s suffrage in 1961, and the incremental abolition of plural voting between 1959 and 1969. The process of electoral reform in the twentieth-century Bahamas was

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