the right of suffrage to women of lawful age, and otherwise qualified according to the provisions of this article. No such enactment shall be of effect until submitted to a vote of the qualified electors at a general election, nor unless the same be approved by a majority of those voting thereon.

The general assembly may prescribe, by law, an educational qualification for electors, but no such law shall take effect prior to the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and ninety, and no qualified elector shall be thereby disqualified.

For the purpose of voting and eligibility to office, no person shall be deemed to have gained a residence by reason of his presence or lost it by reason of his absence, while in the civil or military service of the state, or of the United States, nor while a resident at any institution of learning, nor while kept at public expense in any poor house or other asylum, nor while confined in public prison.

No person while confined in any public prison shall be entitled to vote; but every such person who was a qualified elector prior to such imprisonment, and who is released therefrom by virtue of a pardon, or by virtue of having served out his full term of imprisonment, shall, without further action, be invested with all the rights of citizenship, except as otherwise provided in this constitution.

The general assembly shall pass laws to secure the

purity of elections and guard against abuses of the elective franchise.

(On questions of contracting certain loans by counties, which are required to be submitted to a vote of the people, the suffrage is restricted to taxpayers.)

The state constitutions provide uniformly that the elections shall be free and equal and shall be by ballot, and that electors shall be privileged from arrest, excepting for high crimes and breaches of the peace, and from militia duty, on election day. In some of the states the exemption continues while the elector is going to and returning from the place of election, and in one state it takes effect some days before the election and continues for two days after. These are, however, privileges designed to secure the elector in the enjoyment of the elective franchise, rather than qualifications for suffrage, and we have not, therefore, included them in the suffrage articles given in the foregoing pages. They serve, taken in conjunction with provisions which make bribery and other crimes a cause for disfranchisement, to show the high estimate put upon the right of suffrage by those who framed our organic laws, and their anxiety to place it alike beyond venal and mercenary influences and the changing caprice of legislation, too often prompted and controlled by sinister motive and undue partisanship. As we shall see hereinafter, it has been more than

once found necessary to invoke, through the courts, the constitutional guarantees as a means of asserting the full measure of the right when it has been encroached upon by crude, ill-digested or designing legislation.

CHAPTER III.

COMPUTATION OF TIME.

As has been observed, the language used uniformly in nearly all the foregoing constitutional provisions, in prescribing the time of residence, is "next preceding the election." This has been interpreted as requiring the full completion of time without counting the day on which the election is held.1 In the contested election case of People v. Holden, 28 California Rep. 123, one of the votes in question was cast by a person who went to the county in which he voted on the 22d of September, and the election was held on the 21st of October following. The court said that in order to make thirty days it would be necessary to count both of those days and the whole of each. "The language of the constitution and the statute is that the voter must have resided in the county. thirty days next preceding the election. In our judgment this language means that he must have resided in the county thirty days next preceding the day of election. But conceding that it means next preceding the event of the election, such event cannot be said to have transpired until sundown on the day of the election." The vote was rejected accordingly.

1. Anthony v. Halderman, 7 Kansas Rep. 50.