Kingdom Voting (Part 3): Submission and Suffrage

Arguments over suffrage—who should be permitted to vote—always seem volatile, but such debates exist for a good reason. Who is allowed to wield power in a government is an important decision. While limiting access to this power is often caricatured as bigotry,  the reality is much more nuanced, and it comes down to two core principles.

The first suffrage principle is that people must agree or submit to move forward with a joint decision. People can separate over their differences or argue about them at a standstill, but moving forward together requires agreement or submission. The root issue with this principle is determining the level at which submission should take place. Should all people submit directly to their leaders? So far, that has not been the case. Initially, the system was designed for one vote per property-owning white man, meaning that everyone submitted to the white man who represented them. Children and unmarried women submitted to their fathers, wives submitted to their husbands, and slaves and servants submitted to their masters.

Such an arrangement was problematic for reasons beyond the obvious racist and sexist implications. Free people who had their own households could not vote if they did not own property. A plantation of 500 people had the same share of the vote as a household of one single man. You could multiply the vote by the number of household members, but that assumes that everyone agreed to vote the same way, and that was not always the case. Ultimately, all citizens over the age of 18 were granted the right to vote, which is how the system currently works.

That initial arrangement may seem antiquated and far removed from the way elections work in the 21st century, but things are not really as different as they seem. Instead of families working together to tell the household leader how they want him to vote, constituents work together to tell their representative how they want him or her to vote. Children and non-citizens still cannot vote, regardless of how well-informed they are. They must live with the consequences of elections in which they did not get to participate. Everyone still makes secondhand decisions, but they must now compete with exponentially more people to influence their representatives.