Centenary of women's political rights in Finland

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Who were denied suffrage?

Marjatta Rahikainen

As of late 19th century, many European countries introduced reforms of suffrage and the system of political representation. Because granting suffrage to all citizens would have amounted to a revolutionary political solution, universal suffrage was usually introduced gradually. The reform of the Finnish parliamentary system thus seems exceptional: suffrage was granted to all men and women. On closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that universal suffrage was established gradually in Finland as well, for it was not until the 1970s that all adult Finnish citizens were granted suffrage.

Universal suffrage in its broadest sense would have meant the granting of the right of suffrage to people the decision makers would rather have excluded from political decision making. In many countries, including France and the US, the issue was resolved by deciding that voters had to register for elections. You could thus have a system of universal suffrage in which the voters were, in practice, efficiently screened. The initial Finnish solution was to deny suffrage to undesirable groups.

When the Finnish parliamentary reform was being prepared, the Committee for Constitutional Law decided almost unanimously that some adult citizens should not be granted suffrage. This was also the premise of a Senate bill (Gracious Proposal No 11 of His Imperial Majesty). There was disagreement, however, as to who should be denied suffrage. The majority of the committee that prepared the reform was willing to go against the Senate bill and to grant suffrage to those who had received poor relief. The minority wanted to deny suffrage even to those whose wife or children had received poor relief, and to servants. Yrjö Mäkelin, a member of the Committee for Constitutional Law, opposed the Senate bill and proposed that the right of suffrage should also be granted to people who a) had not paid tax to the government, b) received poor relief and c) had been sentenced to public labour for vagrancy.

The Estates did not, however, amend the Senate bill in these respects. Instead, the following groups were denied suffrage in the parliamentary reform (Parliament Act of 26 July 1906, Section 5):

Similar exceptions to universal suffrage applied to municipal elections as of 1919.

The Committee for Constitutional Law justified these exceptions by arguing that the “elector must be independent to some extent”. Later, bankruptcy was also confirmed as legal grounds for disenfranchisement, but in practice, this regulation was not applied for long: it was repealed in the Parliament Act of 1928 and was never applied to municipal elections. The non-payment of tax as grounds for disenfranchisement was abolished as a result of a tax reform in the national elections of 1928, but not until 1948 in municipal elections. Poor relief as grounds for being denied the right of suffrage was abolished in 1944 in national elections and in 1948 in municipal elections. Poverty as grounds for disenfranchisement was not abolished entirely until the Social Allowance Act of 1956, after which benefit-recipients were no longer placed under the guardianship of a social welfare committee. Being placed under guardianship was not, however, abolished as grounds for the revocation of the right of suffrage until 1972. In the same year, people sentenced to public labour for vagrancy were granted the right of suffrage.

The loss of civic confidence (that is, civil rights) under the Penal Code remained grounds for disenfranchisement until 1969 when such additional sanctions were revoked in the Penal Code. After the end of the Finnish Civil War in 1918, the loss of civic confidence had become an important ground for disenfranchisement because offences against the state were regularly punished in this way. The duration of this sanction, from five to seven years, was counted from the end of the imprisonment. More than 60,000 adult Finnish citizens lost their civil rights at the time. Combined with the number of people receiving poor relief, one can estimate that more than 100,000 adult Finnish citizens were denied suffrage at the time (the number of Finns entitled to vote and stand for election was about 1.4 million in 1919).

The revocation of suffrage would perhaps not be as heavy a sanction today as it was at the time when universal and equal suffrage had just been achieved after a long campaign. In the national elections held before Finland’s independence in 1917, the Senate discussed hundreds of appeals for the amendment of electoral lists. These appeals had been submitted by regular citizens, workers, cottagers, crofters, wage labourers and other agricultural workers and their wives and widows, as well as women workers and servants, all of whom had previously been denied suffrage and now wished to redress that injustice.

Literature and sources