Coloured vote constitutional crisis

The Coloured vote constitutional crisis, also known as the Coloured vote case, was a constitutional crisis that occurred in the Union of South Africa during the 1950s as the result of an attempt by the Nationalist government to remove Coloured voters in the Union's Cape Province from the common voters' rolls. It developed into a dispute between Parliament and the executive, on the one hand, and the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, on the other hand, over the power of Parliament to amend an entrenched clause in the South Africa Act (the constitution) and the power of the Appellate Division to overturn the amendment as unconstitutional. The crisis ended when the government enlarged the Senate and altered its method of election, allowing the amendment to be successfully enacted.

Before the creation of the Union of South Africa, elections in the Cape Colony were conducted on the basis of the qualified franchise. This meant that the right to vote was limited to men meeting property and literacy qualifications, but not restricted on the basis of race. This differed from the other South African colonies: in Natal the franchise was limited to white men in practise though not in law, while in the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony the franchise was limited by law to white men. The South Africa Act, which was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, unified these four colonies to form the Union but preserved their franchise arrangements unchanged. Section 35 of the South Africa Act provided that no law could disenfranchise voters in the Cape Province on the basis of race, unless that law was passed by an absolute supermajority of two-thirds of the members of both Houses of Parliament sitting together in a joint session. Section 35 was entrenched by section 152, which provided that neither section 35 nor section 152 itself could be amended without a similar supermajority in joint session.

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