John Stuart Mill is often understood as a leading theorist of popular sovereignty. And yet, infamously in the eyes of many, he was a proponent of plural voting. To modern readers, who equate popular sovereignty with democracy in the sense of equal universal suffrage or ‘one man, one vote’, it seems inconsistent of him to have held both views. This chapter explains, on the contrary, both that Mill was far from alone in the Victorian era in upholding both positions, and that his reasoning was distinctive for the time. While Mill and other Victorians were little inclined to speak the language of popular sovereignty, they believed that the value of popular self-government was consistent with unequal suffrage. Their belief in this consistency stemmed from their further conviction that the quality of representative government was to be judged by communal or group-based standards – the composition of parliament was meant to ‘mirror’ the social reality of diverse classes, interests and aptitudes that constituted society. Such sociologically grounded desiderata, they argued further, required deviations from what we would now consider a democratic franchise.