The Tools of Racial Disenfranchisement: Lessons from 135,457 Individual Voter Records

Elites worldwide have used a variety of indirect tools to exclude specific racial groups from the electorate when laws or constitutions prevented them from doing so directly. Yet because voter registers rarely capture race, how these tools affect the composition of the electorate remains unclear. We contribute foundational micro-evidence from newly digitized archival data for all 135,457 voters registered in the Cape Colony (South Africa) in 1903, including their racial classification. We examine franchise restrictions introduced by Prime Minister Cecil Rhodes a decade earlier, and find they reduced registered voters of color by at least one third relative to white voters, likely shifting crucial election outcomes. Tracing how race, class, and geography intersect at the individual level, we find increased property requirements had the largest impact. This reveals a trade-off between the breadth and precision of different tools of racial disenfranchisement, with consequences for the socioeconomic composition of the electorate.