Here's the problem this feature exists to solve. Take the vote away from a group, and the people who most want to punish you for it are precisely the people who no longer have the tool to do it. Their anger has nowhere left to act through the ballot, because the ballot is exactly what you took. If that's the whole story, disenfranchisement is free the moment it succeeds — the very people who'd hold you to account for it can't.
So the feature isn't really "a clause that restricts voting." It's an answer to one question: if the ballot box is off the table, where else does the anger go? We found four places, and each one is a section of this post.
The clause itself
Suffrage is a new constitutional clause, Franchise, one per country. It's priced as a major change — 60 PP to open a package, whichever of its fields the package touches. The default for every field is universal adult suffrage, so nothing about an existing country changes until someone amends it.
| Field | Options (default first) | Who loses the vote |
|---|---|---|
| Gender | All · Men only · Women only · Men & married women | The other gender, or unmarried women |
| Min. age | 18 · 21 · 25 · 30 | Anyone younger |
| Max. age | None · 80 · 70 · 60 · 50 | Anyone older |
| Employment | All · Employed only | The unemployed of working age |
| Income | All · Medium+ · High+ | Everyone below the band |
| Education | All · Secondary+ · Degree+ | Everyone below the level |
| Housing | All · Homeowners only | Everyone who doesn't own their home |
One deliberate gap: retirees keep their vote under "employed only" whatever their listed job. The rule only excludes the unemployed who are still of working age, which moves automatically with the country's own pension law — raise the retirement age and some retirees become working-age unemployed and lose the vote; lower it and they get it back. No autocracy charge either way. It's an ordinary law doing what it's always done, not a franchise decision, so it doesn't get charged like one.
1. Before the change takes effect — attempting it is a gamble
The first place the anger goes is the one that's easiest to miss: it goes backwards, into the vote itself, before the change has even happened.
A franchise package gets an elector opinion, the same way a law proposal does. For every elector, we compare whether they could vote under the old rules against whether they could vote under the new ones:
- Lose the vote → −4.0 opinion of every party that voted yes.
- Gain the vote → +2.0 opinion of every party that voted yes.
- Keep the vote either way → no opinion change at all. They react through the autocracy hit instead (section 2).
To put −4.0 in context: a position on one issue on one article is worth at most ±2, and most articles touch two or three issues at once. So losing the vote outweighs any single law you could pass — which is the point. Gaining it back is worth half of that, because restoring a right creates less intense feeling than removing it does. A party that votes no on a disenfranchising package gets rewarded the same way it gets punished for voting yes: the targeted group notices who stood up for them.
And this happens whether or not the package passes. A failed attempt to restrict the vote still moves the opinion of everyone it would have targeted, against every party that voted for it. That's deliberate, and it's the main deterrent in the whole feature: a party doesn't get a free swing at this. Propose it, lose the vote, and the group you aimed at already knows exactly who tried.
2. Through every remaining voter — the autocracy charge
The second place is the one every player of the game already recognises. Restricting the franchise is an act of autocracy, and it's charged the same way arrests, press bans and the rest of that catalogue are: as points, applied to the party's whole standing, felt by every voter — not just the ones the change targets.
Points are fixed per option, not per how many people the change happens to affect this week:
| Field → option | Points |
|---|---|
| Gender → men only / women only | 75 |
| Gender → men & married women | 55 |
| Min. age → 21 / 25 / 30 | 10 / 20 / 30 |
| Max. age → 80 / 70 / 60 / 50 | 10 / 20 / 35 / 50 |
| Employment → employed only | 30 |
| Income → medium+ / high+ | 40 / 60 |
| Education → secondary+ / degree+ | 15 / 50 |
| Housing → homeowners only | 40 |
Fixed points is a deliberate trade against realism. We could have scaled the charge to how many of the (sampled) electorate the change actually excludes, and it would sound more accurate. But the warning in section 1 has to show you an exact number before you vote, and an elector sample gets reseeded over a country's life. If the price moved with the sample, the number in that warning would drift for reasons that have nothing to do with what you did — the same package could cost different amounts depending on when the game last topped up the electorate. Fixed points make the price a fact about the option, not a fact about this week's sample, so the warning never lies to you.
The proposing party pays the full amount, because they wrote it. Every other party that votes yes pays half — the same complicity split as every other autocratic act in the game. Vote no, abstain, or don't show up, and it costs your party nothing. And critically: it's only charged if the package is actually ratified. A failed or withdrawn package charges no autocracy at all — it still costs the opinion hit from section 1, but not this one. That split is on purpose: the electorate punishes the attempt; the autocracy score punishes the outcome.
3. After the vote is restored — the grudge doesn't fade on schedule
Ordinarily, a party's standing with any group of electors fades: opinion built from how it voted washes out over roughly the last 500 game days, oldest votes mattering least. If franchise opinion faded the same way, a party could restrict the vote, wait out the clock, and arrive at the next election with the −4.0 already gone — even though the people it targeted still couldn't vote for most of that time.
So the fade clock for a disenfranchised elector doesn't start on the day the restriction passed. It starts on the day they get the vote back. Until then, the grudge sits at full strength — not counted at the ballot, because they can't vote, but tracked, so a poll of exactly the people who were disenfranchised still shows it. If a later package takes the vote away from them again, the clock pauses again, and only starts once more from whichever package restores it after that.
The knock-on effect is that a franchise package's opinion cost has no real statute of limitations. A ten-year-old restriction that's never been undone is still costing the parties that voted for it exactly what it cost the day it passed, because the group it hurt has never had the 500 days of restored voting the fade clock needs to run down. That's what "the anger doesn't fade while you can't vote" means in practice: it isn't a metaphor, it's a paused clock.
4. Outside elections — the Suffrage Crisis, and who counts as "restoring"
The last place the anger goes is the one that doesn't wait for a poll at all: the country's mood. Strip the vote from enough people at once and a new Suffrage Crisis mood takes hold — triggered whenever a change removes the vote from at least 10% of the electorate that could vote before. It lasts 180 days, and restricting the franchise again during that window resets the clock rather than stacking a second one.
What a Suffrage Crisis actually does is give the country an easier way back — but only for a package that's a genuine step toward restoring the vote:
| Rule | Normally | During a Suffrage Crisis |
|---|---|---|
| Threshold | Full Article II supermajority | Halved — for a widening-only package |
| Cooldown | Set by Article II after the last change | Skipped — for a widening-only package |
| Qualifies? | — | Only if every field is unchanged or excludes strictly fewer people |
The trigger for the crisis itself follows the same principle, deliberately, in the opposite direction: it fires on how many people actually lost the vote, not on whether the change looks like a restriction on paper. A mixed package, or a gender swap that hands the vote to one group while taking it from another, still triggers a Suffrage Crisis if enough people end up on the losing side of it — because the country doesn't care that some ledger balanced. It cares that millions can no longer vote.
When there's almost no one left to vote for
One more scenario the design had to answer directly, because leaving it to the normal election logic would have gotten it wrong: what happens if a country restricts the franchise down to a handful of people, or nobody at all?
We don't block that rule — a package is still allowed to leave zero people eligible. That's a legitimate, if bleak, outcome to model. What we do block is treating a near-empty electorate as an ordinary election with a small turnout. Below 25 analysed, eligible electors, an election isn't held at all: every seat simply stays with whoever holds it. The reason isn't arbitrary — the ordinary maths for splitting seats by vote share, handed an electorate too thin to mean anything, would divide the seats evenly among every party standing, including ones nobody voted for at all. That's a worse outcome than freezing the legislature: it would launder a near-total disenfranchisement into a random reshuffle of power. Freezing it instead keeps the incentive honest — restricting the franchise down to nothing doesn't hand you a fresh legislature, it hands you a country that can't hold an election, and stays in crisis until it can.
And that's the part that closes the loop: the Suffrage Crisis mood doesn't expire on its own 180-day clock while the electorate is this small. Every poll and election keeps it refreshed instead, so a country can't be left permanently locked out of its only way back — the halved threshold and waived cooldown stay available for as long as it takes to widen the franchise back past that floor.
Every rule in this feature answers the same question: if you take away someone's vote, where does their anger go instead? Nowhere is the honest answer we didn't want to ship.
The full rules — every field, every option, every number in this post — are on the wiki under Suffrage. Read it before you draft a package; the notice on the package itself will only ever show you your own party's price.