Editing Prussian three-class franchise (section)

=== 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.