Unfair election

An unfair election is a concept used by national and international election monitoring groups to identify when the vote of the people for a government is not free and fair. Unfairness in elections encompasses all varieties of electoral fraud, voter suppression or intimidation, unbalanced campaign finance rules, and imbalanced access to the media. Unfair elections violate the right to vote, which is generally recognised as an essential element to a deliberative democracy and representative democracy. History of democracy Although some form of elections have been held since antiquity, in every society until 1893, large number of people were excluded based on their status, particularly slaves, poor, women, people with different skin colour, and people without formal education. The first democratic election in the modern sense was the 1893 general election in New Zealand, when women won the vote at the age of 21 like men, property qualifications were scrapped, and restrictions on Maori people voting were discarded. In the United Kingdom, some form of representation in government had been guaranteed since the Magna Carta 1215, but only for a tiny elite, and potentially vetoed by the Monarch. The Monarch's power was eliminated following the Glorious Revolution 1688, and then elections became progressively more democratic. As property qualifications were slowly phased out from 1832 to in 1918, women's suffrage became non-discriminatory in 1928, and the last vestiges of double voting were abolished in 1948. In the United States, elections for the Federal government were administered in each of the states. Around half of all successful constitutional amendments since the Revolution of 1776 concerned elections and the franchise. Slavery was abolished in 1865, universal suffrage for men in the United States House of Representatives was achieved over 1868 and 1870, direct elections to the Senate secured in 1913, women won the vote in 1920, and poll taxes levied by the states were banned in 1964.