Editing Suffrage (section)

===Race===
Various countries, usually countries with a dominant race within a wider population, have historically denied the vote to people of particular races, or to all but the dominant race. This has been achieved in a number of ways:
* Official – laws and regulations passed specifically disenfranchising people of particular races (for example, the [[Antebellum United States]], [[Boer republic]]s, pre-apartheid and [[apartheid]] South Africa, or many colonial political systems, who provided suffrage only for white settlers and some privileged non-white groups). Canada and Australia denied suffrage for their indigenous populations until the 1960s.
* Indirect – nothing in law specifically prevents anyone from voting on account of their race, but other laws or regulations are used to exclude people of a particular race. In southern states of the United States of America before the passage of the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] and the [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]], [[Poll tax (United States)|poll taxes]], [[literacy test|literacy]] and other tests were used to disenfranchise African-Americans.<ref name="Transcript of Voting Rights Act 1965"/><ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20090214180002/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,897070,00.html The Constitution: The 24th Amendment] ''Time''. Retrieved 24 October 2011.</ref> Property qualifications have tended to disenfranchise a minority race, particularly if tribally owned land is not allowed to be taken into consideration. In some cases this was an unintended (but usually welcome) consequence.{{citation needed|date=December 2014}} Many African colonies after World War II until decolonization had tough education and property qualifications which practically gave meaningful representation only for rich European minorities.
* Unofficial – nothing in law prevents anyone from voting on account of their race, but people of particular races are intimidated or otherwise prevented from exercising this right. This was a common tactic employed by white Southerners against [[Freedmen]] during the [[Reconstruction Era]] and the following period before more formal methods of disenfranchisement became entrenched. Unofficial discrimination could even manifest in ways which, while allowing the act of voting itself, effectively deprive it of any value – for example, in [[Israel]], the country's [[Arab citizens of Israel|Arab minority]] has maintained a party-system separate from that of the Jewish majority. In the run-up for the country's [[2015 Israeli legsialtive election|2015 elections]], the electoral threshold was raised from 2% to 3.25%, thus forcing the dominant Arab parties – [[Hadash]], the [[United Arab List]], [[Balad (political party)|Balad]] and [[Ta'al]] – either to run under [[Joint List|one list]] or risk losing their parliamentary representation.