[Jetrel]

So - AFAIK, originally most white men weren't allowed to vote, in the US; I can't remember when this got changed, but in the very earliest formulation, there was a strong limitation where only certain kinds of landed property owners were allowed to vote.

I believe this had several intents behind it; one of them was of course just plain-old elitism/cronyism, but I think there were also some elements of using it as a proxy for education, shared-culture, and (presumed) fiscal responsibility.

There also was probably a surprisingly pragmatic problem of logistics; a small register of settled-down property owners was probably far easier to collect votes from that a wild array of migrant laborers, whalers, fur-trappers, and frontiersmen.

(Yeah, I just checked up on this, and it looks like this was gradually abolished, over the course of the century before the civil war, on a state-by-state basis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_St... )