Editing Prussian three-class franchise (section)

== Election procedures ==

=== Eligibility to vote ===
Every Prussian male who had reached the age of 25 and had lived in a Prussian municipality for at least six months was eligible to vote. He could not have lost his civil rights through a legal judgment or be receiving public assistance for the poor.<ref>Ordinance on Conducting the Election of Deputies to the Second Chamber, § 8.</ref> Under paragraph 49 of the Reich Military Act of 1874 ({{Lang|de|[[s:de:Reichs-Militärgesetz|Reichs-Militärgesetz]]}}), active military personnel, with the exception of military officers, were excluded from the right to vote both in the federal states and for the Reichstag.

=== The three classes ===
Those eligible to vote were divided into three classes based on the revenue from direct state taxes (class tax or classified income tax, property tax and business tax).

Within each district, the eligible voters who paid the most taxes fell into the first class. The top taxpaying eligible voters were assigned to this class until one third of the total tax revenue was reached. Then those who paid the most taxes among the remaining eligible voters were put into the second class until one-third of the total tax revenue was again reached. All remaining eligible voters – who also contributed one-third of total taxes – formed the third class.

If the tax paid by a voter placed him partially in the first and partially the second class, he was allocated to the first. The tax amount of the first class would then exceed one third of the total taxes, with the result that the amount attributable to the second and third classes was recalculated by dividing the remaining amount equally between those two classes.

Eligible voters elected from 3 to 6 electors in their primary district. Each district provided one elector for each 250 inhabitants according to the latest census. A primary electoral district thus had a minimum of 750 and a maximum of 1,749 inhabitants.

In municipalities with several primary election districts it was possible that after the class allocation procedure there were no eligible voters at all in the first or even in the first and second classes. In such cases, the allocation was carried out again at the level of the individual electoral district. In 1908, in 2,214 of 29,028 primary election districts, the first class consisted of only one person. In 1888, in 2,283 of 22,749 primary election districts there was only one eligible voter in class one; in another 1,764 there were two eligible voters, and in 96 primary election districts there was also only one eligible voter in the second class.
[[File:Johannes von Miquel.jpg|thumb|212x212px|Johannes von Miquel]]
In 1891 and 1893 the allocation of eligible voters into classes was restructured as a result of the far-reaching tax reforms introduced under Prussian Finance Minister [[Johannes von Miquel]]. Land, building and businesses taxes became municipal rather than state taxes. A progressive income tax replaced the class tax and the classified income tax; in addition, a supplementary tax (wealth tax) was introduced as a direct state tax.

The progressive income tax rates and supplementary tax placed a heavier burden on wealthy citizens, with the result that even fewer men would have been allocated to the first and second classes. To prevent this, an amount of three marks was applied to each voter who did not pay income tax. Voters who paid no other direct tax beyond the fictitious three marks always fell into the third class. Direct municipal taxes were henceforth also taken into account along with direct state taxes when calculating classes.

Where no municipal taxes were levied, the taxes that would have been due under previous law continued to be taken into account as a fictitious amount. This was a de facto protection clause for landlords in municipality-free manor districts. There were no municipal taxes since landowners would have paid them to themselves. Until then, landowners paid a considerable amount of tax on land but often little on income. Without the credit of notional municipal taxes, some landowners could have slipped into the second class.

Another significant change for cities in 1891 was that the division into classes was always carried out at the level of the primary election district. Until then, in municipalities divided into several primary election districts, the required tax amount for the first or second class was the same in all primary election districts (unless a class had remained unoccupied in this way). That changed in 1891, in some cases drastically. In 1888, for example, 494 marks were required for the first class in [[Cologne]] in all primary election districts. If the division into thirds had been carried out under the new rules at the level of the original election districts, the amount would have varied between 18 and 24,896 marks. After the change, the amount required in 1893 for the first class in [[Berlin]] varied between twelve marks in the poorest original electoral district and 27,000 marks in Voßstrasse (where the Reich Chancellery was located). The change made it both easier for many urban citizens with low and middle incomes to move up to the second or even first class and for wealthy citizens in rich primary election districts to slip into the third class; Reich Chancellor [[Bernhard von Bülow]] had to vote in the third class in 1903.

The share of voters in the classes fluctuated over time and also regionally. Nationwide, the third class accounted for about 80 to 85 percent of eligible voters, and the first class for about 4%. In 1913, the third class accounted for 79.8% of eligible voters (down from 85.3% in 1898), the second class for 15.8% (up from 11.4% in 1898), and the first class for 4.4% (up from 3.3% in 1898).

In 1913 there were 190,444 primary electoral votes statewide in the first class and 1,990,262 in the third class. Since both classes elected the same number of electors, the votes of first class primary voters had a weight 10.45 times greater than those of third class voters.

=== Election of electors (primary election) ===
Choosing electors took place in a meeting of the primary voters on a day that was uniform throughout the state. The election was held separately by classes. If there was a total of three electors to be chosen, each class elected one; if there were six, each elected two. If there were four electors to be chosen, the first and third classes each elected one and the second class two; if there were 5 electors to be chosen, the first and third classes each elected two and the second class elected only one. An elector had to be eligible to vote in the primary election district but did not have to be a member of the class in which he was elected.

The third class voted first, the first last. Voting was not secret. When voting was completed in a class, its voters, unless they were members of the electoral board, had to leave the polling station. The voters of the first class could observe the voting behavior of all voters, those of the second could observe the third, while the voters of the third class did not know how the higher classes voted.

Voters were called one after the other in descending order of their tax payments. The voter named one or two candidates depending on the number of electors to be chosen in the class. An absolute majority of those voting was required for election. If an absolute majority was not achieved, those men not yet elected who had the most votes were placed on a runoff ballot, twice as many of them as there were electors still to be elected. In most cases the electors won by a large majority.

Those men elected had to declare their acceptance or rejection of the election immediately, if present, otherwise within three days, including election day. If an elector who was not present rejected the results, a by-election was held a few days later.

In 1906, in cities with a population of 50,000 or more, the electoral assembly was replaced by the time-limit voting that is now common practice, allowing voters to cast their ballots within a specified period of time.
=== Electoral districts (constituencies) ===
The electors of a constituency gathered on a uniform national day at a polling place in their constituency, established by law in 1860, to elect members of parliament. Usually there were several hundred electors in a constituency, in some cases well over 1,000. One to three deputies were elected in each constituency, although before 1860 there were constituencies with more. In 1860, 176 electoral districts were established by law. The electoral districts always comprised one or more entire city or county districts; only Berlin was divided into several electoral districts.

Apart from minor shifts in district boundaries, there was only one change to these constituencies before a law of 1906 that was effective with the 1908 election. Under its terms, several constituencies with particularly large population growth were divided into smaller constituencies and a total of 10 additional seats were allocated to these areas (Greater Berlin 5, [[Ruhr]] 4, and [[Upper Silesia]] 1). Otherwise, the only changes in constituency division were additional constituencies for areas annexed to Prussia after the [[Austro-Prussian War]] of 1866 ([[Hanover]], [[Hesse Nassau|Hesse-Nassau]], and [[Schleswig-Holstein]] in 1867, and [[Lauenburg]] in 1876). In the long term, a trend toward more single-member constituencies can be observed:

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center"
|-
| Electoral Districts<br />by Number of Representatives
| '''1861'''
| '''1867'''
| '''1876'''
| '''1885'''
| '''1888'''
| '''1908'''
|-
| '''1 Representative'''
| 27
| 105
| 106
| 104
| 105
| 132
|-
| '''2 Representatives'''
| 122
| 123
| 123
| 124
| 125
| 121
|-
| '''3 Representatives'''
| 27
| 27
| 27
| 27
| 26
| 23
|-
| ''Total Electoral Districts''
| ''176''
| ''255''
| ''256''
| ''255''
| ''256''
| ''276''
|-
| ''Total Seats''
| '''352'''
| '''432'''
| '''433'''
| '''433'''
| '''433'''
| '''443'''
|}

The classes, which were only minimally adjusted for population changes, further favored the conservatives, since their deputies came mainly from eastern and rural parts of the country with low population growth.

=== Election of deputies ===
Unlike in the primary elections, the classes played no role in the election of deputies. If several deputies were to be elected, a separate vote was held for each seat. An absolute majority of votes was required for election. If this was not achieved, a runoff took place. Until 1903 all candidates who received more than one vote on the first ballot were allowed to participate in the second ballot. In each subsequent ballot, the candidate with the fewest votes was eliminated. If there was a tie between the two remaining candidates, the decision was made by drawing lots. Beginning in 1903, a runoff election of the two candidates with the most votes was held immediately, as in the primary elections. If two candidates each received exactly half of the votes on the first ballot, the decision was made by lot from 1906 onward; until then, a runoff also took place in such a case. In order to streamline the rather time-consuming election of deputies, from 1903 the electors cast their votes at one time if more than one deputy was to be elected, i.e. they had to indicate who they wanted to vote for the first, second and, if applicable, third seat. More than 90% of the deputies were elected on the first ballot.