The history of voting rights in Nigeria mirrors the complexity of the nation itself. Beginning within the country's colonial period, elections in Nigeria began in 1923 by the direction of British colonial administrator Hugh Clifford through a legislative act known as the Clifford Constitution. However, reflecting the variety of people groups and distinctive cultures confined with the nation's borders, the ethnolinguistic groups and colonial authorities that dominated the northern, eastern, and western regions of Nigeria (namely, the Hausa-Fulani, Igbo, and Yoruba people respectively) often offered vastly different perceptions into suffrage qualifications— notably including differences in gender, nationality, residency, age, tax, and income requirements— in Nigeria's early years. Though the