Foundational political economic theories, such as the Meltzer-Richards model of redistribution, predict that expanding the pool of citizens that decide on taxation should increase the tax burden, especially on the rich. However, this dynamic has proven difficult to find empirically. In this paper, I fill this gap by leveraging the uneven extension of suffrage in historical Norwegian municipalities and a newly assembled dataset on local taxation types and levels. By taking advantage of the vastly different expansion of the vote across geographical space, I find that the overall tax burden for the most part is unaffected by expanding the voter population. However, the types of taxes collected are impacted: income tax rates increase, while wealth and property tax rates exhibit less clear patterns. This finding points to inter-elite conflict being the driver of changes to fiscal policy, also in democracies.