From the 1660s onward to the end of colonial times, eligibility to vote, in all of New England except Rhode Island, was determined by various property qualifications. The most common of these qualifications, besides being an adult male over 21, or sometimes 24, was the "40 shilling freehold," or ownership (without mortgage or other restraint) of real property judged sufficient to rent for 40 shillings a year. This was the traditional English practice; landholders of this economic status voted in England for members of the House of Commons. Often associated with it was an alternative requirement for a certain amount of personal property; in Massachusetts and Connecticut, 40£, in New Hampshire 50£. Rhode Island began with an incredibly idiosyncratic franchise in the seventeenth century—the individual town meetings simply voted on which individuals should receive the franchise and the colony accepted them as qualified voters—but came to the 40 shilling freehold by the first quarter of the eighteenth century.

Participation in local affairs often had a lower property threshold than the right to vote for representatives; for instance, in eighteenth-century Massachusetts, all freeholders (owners of real property) and those with any property worth 20£ seem to have had the right to vote in town affairs. Historians have argued at great length about just what proportion of adult males were eligible to vote under these laws, taking into account the distribution of property, changing values of money due to inflation and currency revaluation, and widely different patterns of local enforcement or nonenforcement of the law. The best overall judgment is that in the eighteenth century, the substantial majority of adult men in rural towns were able to vote in town meeting, both on local affairs and for representatives.

In some of the New England states after the Revolution there was a dramatic legal shift toward broader, more egalitarian requirements for voting. New Hampshire in 1784 required voters to be males over 21 who paid any tax, which in 1792 it became payment of a "poll" (or head) tax. By 1827 all males over 21 except paupers were allowed to vote. The new state of Vermont by 1797 gave the suffrage to all men over 21 "of quiet and peaceable behavior."

Elsewhere, however, things moved more slowly from suffrage for the majority of adult males to suffrage for all. The 1780 Massachusetts Constitution actually raised the property qualification for voters in state elections by 1/3, turning the "40 shilling freehold" into a "sixty shilling" one. But in 1782, all males over 21 who paid a poll tax and an additional tax equal to 2/3 of another poll tax, were allowed to vote in town affairs. We may well wonder whether it was possible for the town clerks to keep the two different sets of voters' qualifications straight in their minds, or whether the looser requirements for town elections weren't normally applied across the board. In 1811, participation in town affairs was made still easier; all males resident for a year "liable to be taxed," excluding paupers, were eligible to vote for town officers, and all who had paid a poll tax in the preceding year were eligible to vote on all other town affairs. Technically, the years between 1811 and 1820 had a three-layered electorate, which must have been complex to administer—if it was administered. It was not until the amendment of the state constitution in 1820 that things were simplified, with the granting of the vote to all Massachusetts males over 21 who had paid any state or county tax in the last two years (these were parts of the town tax rate, levied every year). A further broadening of the suffrage with the abolition of the taxpaying requirement did not occur till the twentieth century.

Maine was part of Massachusetts until their separation in 1820, when it granted the vote to all males over 21 except paupers. Connecticut hung on to the "40 shilling freehold" or "40£ estate" (revalued as a $7 freehold and $134 estate) until the new Constitution of 1818, which allowed for white males over 21 with a £7 freehold, one year's militia service, or payment of any state tax within the year. This widened the franchise slightly farther than Massachusetts' action; then, in 1845, the vote was extended to all white males over 21.

Rhode Island's franchise is the oddest part of the story. Beginning with the very loose voter qualifications of the seventeenth century, the provincial government tightened enforcement of the "40 shilling freehold" in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and carefully adjusted it to changes in currency. The result was the smallest electorate in early nineteenth-century New England, with a substantial majority of adult males unable to vote. Only men with fairly significant landholdings—and their eldest sons, another Rhode Island quirk—had political rights. Only the formation of an alternative government elected by the disfranchised majority in 1841 and an armed struggle called the "Dorr War" after John Dorr, the leader of the insurgents, produced reform. The 1843 Rhode Island constitution provided, like Connecticut's of 1818, the vote both for the old "40 shilling freehold," and for white males who either paid a $1 state tax or served one year in the militia.

By the 1830s, the substantial majority of white males over 21 could vote in New England, if we exclude Rhode Island. In northern New England, suffrage extended to all except paupers.

The poll tax or "any tax" requirement—usually under $1—operated to keep the franchise from the very poorest men, perhaps some laborers and factory workers, the chronically unemployed due to ill health or alcoholism, the most marginal tenant farmers. The great majority of men in most rural towns would have been able to vote. Probably the greatest beneficiaries of the early nineteenth-century broadening of the franchise were young artisans and laborers in their twenties who had not accumulated much if any property. Since their relative numbers were increasing in the population throughout the period, with agriculture's relative decline and an increasingly unequal distribution of property, we might well conclude that electoral reform was necessary simply to maintain the relative level of electoral democracy which existed in rural New England in the latter eighteenth century.

African Americans and other people of color were allowed to vote in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, although Roger Parks has found evidence that they were sometimes barred from the polls. They were explicitly excluded from the franchise in Connecticut between 1814 and 1876, and in Rhode Island between 1822 and 1842.

Interestingly, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the two most industrial states with the largest relative concentrations of poverty and propertyless workers, retained some tax qualification for voting throughout the nineteenth century.