Towards a democratic franchise – Part II

After its introduction in 1939, the secret ballot had led to elections appearing to be more orderly. It therefore had met some of the main expectations that had been placed in it.

Nevertheless, the general election of 1949, once again, returned a House of Assembly dominated by Bay Street.

Whitehall’s hopes that with a liberal franchise and the secret ballot the political affairs of the Colony ought to right themselves, were dashed.

Of course, by democratic standards of the mid-twentieth century, the franchise did not really deserve being characterised as liberal any longer, although it is also true that of the colonies of the British Caribbean, at this point in time only Jamaica had universal adult suffrage. However, it is prudent to revisit the General Assembly Elections Act of 1946. It marked the final victory of the secret ballot throughout the entire Bahamas. Yet, as would be the case in almost all other instances, where new democratic principles were to be enshrined in the election laws of the Bahamas, Bay Street compensated for the potential effects of this concession by including other new features in the same law that were arguably less than democratic, but that were designed to reinforce the status quo instead.

At first glance, the Act left the qualifications for the suffrage unchanged. The core criteria were that voters had to be male British subjects, aged twenty-one years or older, who had been resident in the Bahamas for at least twelve months prior to the election, and who either owned real estate worth at least £5, or who rented real estate at a minimum rate of either £2.8s. a year in New Providence or £1.4s. a year in the Out Islands.

The 1946 Act retained these figures from the 1919 Act, which had retained them from the 1882 Act. This meant that their real value had decreased considerably with inflation.

As had been the case with the General Assembly Elections Act of 1919, the property qualifications of the 1946 Act continued to allow some men multiple votes, but deprived others of their votes altogether. A man got one vote in each constituency in which he met the property qualification. However, if he owned multiple properties in a single constituency, he could only cast a single vote. Also, if a property was owned by more than one man, or if a qualifying rental property was rented by more than one tenant, only one man could exercise the vote for that property and his co-owners or co-renters were disenfranchised, even if the value of the property in question was multiple times the required minimum amount.

More consequential, however, was a new kind of qualification through which a voter could gain additional votes: “When the owner or tenant of real property within the Colony is a company, one of the officers or directors of such company, nominated for the purpose by the directors thereof, provided he is otherwise qualified under section 15 of this Act, may become a registered voter in respect of such real property.”

This provision would gain notoriety as the company vote, which, unlike the traditional plural vote based on real property, allowed voters not merely to vote in multiple electoral districts, but to cast multiple votes in the same district. Curiously, the significance of the above passage that amounted to the introduction of a company vote went virtually unnoticed. Some – particularly the non-white Members of the House of Assembly, parts of the Bahamian media, and, to an extent, even the British authorities, had fought for the secret ballot, ostensibly to make Bahamian elections more democratic, yet the sources are silent on the introduction of the company vote.