disfranchising

He wanted to gain a Congressional investigation into South Carolina's disfranchising of its black citizens; he intended to object to South Carolina's nine electoral votes in the 1896 presidential election (which had all gone to the Democratic candidate).

He did not know that the English people would soon be made impotent, not by the disfranchising of their constituents, but simply by the silencing of their members; and that the governing class of England did not now depend upon rotten boroughs, but upon rotten representatives.