information:extraction
Disenfranchisement of Coloured voters

In 1950, D. F. Malan announced the NP's intention to create a Coloured Affairs Department. J.G. Strijdom, Malan's successor as prime minister, moved to strip voting rights from black and Coloured residents of the Cape Province. The previous government had introduced the Separate Representation of Voters Bill into Parliament in 1951, turning it to be an Act on 18 June 1951; however, four voters, G Harris, W D Franklin, W D Collins and Edgar Deane, challenged its validity in court with support from the United Party. The Cape Supreme Court upheld the act, but reversed by the Appeal Court, finding the act invalid because a two-thirds majority in a joint sitting of both Houses of Parliament was needed to change the entrenched clauses of the Constitution. The government then introduced the High Court of Parliament Bill (1952), which gave Parliament the power to overrule decisions of the court. The Cape Supreme Court and the Appeal Court declared this invalid too.

In 1955 the Strijdom government increased the number of judges in the Appeal Court from five to 11, and appointed pro-Nationalist judges to fill the new places. In the same year they introduced the Senate Act, which increased the Senate from 49 seats to 89. Adjustments were made such that the NP controlled 77 of these seats. The parliament met in a joint sitting and passed the Separate Representation of Voters Act in 1956, which transferred Coloured voters from the common voters' roll in the Cape to a new Coloured voters' roll. Immediately after the vote, the Senate was restored to its original size. The Senate Act was contested in the Supreme Court, but the recently enlarged Appeal Court, packed with government-supporting judges, upheld the act, and also the Act to remove Coloured voters.

The 1956 law allowed Coloureds to elect four people to Parliament, but a 1969 law abolished those seats and stripped Coloureds of their right to vote. Since Indians had never been allowed to vote, this resulted in whites being the sole enfranchised group.

Separate representatives for coloured voters were first elected in the general election of 1958. Even this limited representation did not last, being ended from 1970 by the Separate Representation of Voters Amendment Act, 1968. Instead, all coloured adults were given the right to vote for the Coloured Persons Representative Council, which had limited legislative powers. The council was in turn dissolved in 1980. In 1984 a new constitution introduced the Tricameral Parliament in which coloured voters elected the House of Representatives.

A 2016 study in The Journal of Politics suggests that disenfranchisement in South Africa had a significant negative effect on basic service delivery to the disenfranchised.