Introduction: Universal Suffrage on Trial

Abstract

A central feature of democratic political systems is the right of its members to elect those empowered to make, change and abolish the laws of the nation. Without the right to vote, there would be no mechanism in large-scale societies for transferring public power between political fractions or, indeed, no representative government at all. More fundamentally, the right to vote is a vehicle for social, economic and political change, as it provides all of the members of a community with a roughly equal opportunity to affect the future direction of society. Through the vote, the people are able to influence the process defining society’s rights, obligations, benefits and sacrifices and how these should be distributed. The right to participate in the decisions of governments has, consequently, been characterised as the ‘right of rights’¹