the poor were 70% of the electorate and in Irajá, in the province of Rio de Janeiro, they were 87%. Ex-slaves couldn't vote, but their children and grandchildren could, as could the illiterate (which few countries allowed). In 1872, 13% of the free Brazilian population voted. For comparison, in 1870 in the UK, electoral participation was 7% of the total population; in Italy, it was 2%; in Portugal, 9%; and in the Netherlands 2.5%. In 1832, the year of the British electoral reform, 3% of the British voted. Further reforms in 1867 and 1884 managed to expand electoral participation in the UK to 15%. Although electoral fraud was common, it did not pass unobserved by Pedro II, or the politicians and experts of that time, who considered it a great problem to be resolved. Some measures, like the electoral reforms of 1855, 1875 and 1881, had been taken with intention to eliminate, or at least to diminish, fraud. Electoral reforms The Law of 19 September 1855 created the district vote and incompatibilities (also known as non-eligibility). The first one had as objective to make possible the representation of all the local factions, while the latter had the purpose of reducing the influence of the government (independent of what party was in power) in the result of the elections. Beyond these new features, it was forbidden that public officials campaign in their own districts, as a measure to prevent them from using public resources for their own political benefit. As a consequence, presidents of provinces, as well as provincial secretaries, military, judges and chiefs of police were prohibited from running in the district where they served, although they could still run in a different district. The positive results of the reform were already apparent in the immediate following elections, in 1856: prior to that time, such officials constituted the majority of new members of Parliament. The reduction in their numbers allowed the “real country"(the Brazilian people) to enter “directly into the Parliament"(that is, a true representative democracy), as was desired by Honório Hermeto Carneiro Leão. The next reform occurred in 1875, when a mechanism was introduced that would make possible the representation of minorities (eliminating once and for all the ignominious unanimous assemblies): the system of the third, where the voters chose only 2/3 of the list of voters of the province, and in turn, the voters voted in 2/3 of