Franchise

The right to vote, and by extension the rules that say who holds it.

The first rules the American administration wrote in the Philippines, under Philippine Commission Act No. 60 of 1901, limited the vote to men aged twenty-three and over, resident six months in the municipality, and falling into one of three classes: literate in English or Spanish, owner of real property worth at least five hundred pesos, or holder of local office before 1898.

Read as a description rather than as a rule, those three classes are a portrait of the men the previous four hundred years had already put on top. At the first legislative election, in 1907, the resulting electorate was 1.15 percent of the population.

The general point the term carries in this course: when an outcome keeps reproducing under fair procedure, audit the eligibility rules rather than the count.

Source: Julio C. Teehankee, “Electoral Politics in the Philippines,” in Electoral Politics in Southeast and East Asia, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2002, p. 150, citing Tancangco 1988, p. 81, and p. 151, citing Liang 1970, p. 67. Free PDF: https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/iez/01361006.pdf

First used in: 1.4 · Elections that made the landlords stronger