The History of Elections and Voting — A Two-Part Series

• Part 1: How One Vote Became One Vote — The Principles and Tools of the Ballot (current article)
• Part 2: The Mechanics of Turning Votes into Seats — Electoral Systems, the U.S. Electoral College, and the Count

History of Elections and Voting Part 1: How One Vote Became One Vote — The Principles and Tools of the Ballot

In March 1856, the parliament of the Colony of Victoria in Australia passed a law that changed how voting worked. Until that point, voters had been required to declare publicly who they supported — calling out a name aloud, signing a ledger, or announcing their chosen candidate in front of a crowd of onlookers. Tenants who rented from landlords had to keep an eye on what their landlord wanted, and workers dependent on employers for their livelihoods faced silent pressure outside the polling place. Money changed hands, alcohol flowed freely, and intimidation was far from rare.^[1]

The new law changed all of that. Ballots printed directly by the government were distributed, and voters stepped inside a private booth, marked their choice alone, folded the paper, and dropped it into a box. No one could see. This was the secret ballot. That same year, South Australia followed suit, and the practice spread around the world under the name “Australian ballot.”^[2]

Yet in the long history of elections, the secret ballot is, perhaps surprisingly, a relatively late arrival. The act of voting itself goes back to fifth-century BCE Athens, but the four principles we take for granted today — universal, equal, direct, and secret — were not all in place at the same time until well into the twentieth century. This article traces that slow and uneven process.

Voting with Pottery Shards: Athenian Ostracism

In fifth-century BCE Athens, there was a procedure for banishing for ten years any individual considered a threat to the city. Known as ostrakismos — from which the English word “ostracism” derives — it gave citizens a collective mechanism for checking the power of the powerful.^[3]

The process had two stages. First, the Assembly (the ekklesia) voted by show of hands on whether to hold a banishment vote that year. If the majority said yes, the main vote — the ostrakophoria — was held in the agora a few weeks later. Citizens scratched the name of the person they wished to exile onto a blank pottery shard, or ostrakon (plural: ostraka), and deposited it in a voting receptacle.^[3] Pottery shards were everywhere in ancient Athens — discarded material that could be picked up off the street without any need for printing or official preparation.

A result was only valid if at least 6,000 votes were cast, and whoever received the most votes had to leave Athens within ten days. Property was not confiscated, and return was permitted after ten years.^[3] In the seventy-one years between 487 and 416 BCE, only thirteen people were actually banished. The institution’s deterrent effect arguably mattered more than its practical use.

More than eleven thousand inscribed ostraka have been unearthed at the Athenian Agora and the Kerameikos excavation site.^[3] Among the names scratched into them are figures well known from history — Themistocles, Aristides, and others.

Voting in the Courts: Solid Axle and Hollow Axle

Separate from ostracism, the Athenian law courts had their own distinct method of voting. At the end of a trial, each juror-citizen received two bronze discs: one with a solid axle through the center, and one with a hollow axle. The solid axle meant acquittal; the hollow axle meant conviction.^[4] Jurors held the axle between thumb and forefinger and dropped the disc into the voting vessel — a design that made it impossible for any observer standing nearby to see which disc had been chosen.

These bronze discs were called psephoi. The Greek verb psephizein, meaning “to vote,” derives from the same root — the word for a small stone or pebble.^[4] It is a striking example of a voting tool leaving its mark on language itself.

Rome’s Ballot Reforms: From Voice to Lead Tablet

The Roman Republic conducted elections and legislation through various assemblies (comitia). Yet until the mid-second century BCE, Roman voting was done out loud: citizens declared the name of their preferred candidate verbally, and designated officers (rogatores) recorded the choices on lead tablets.^[5] Everyone within earshot knew what everyone else had chosen.

The change came with the Lex Gabinia Tabellaria of 139 BCE. Proposed by the tribune Aulus Gabinius, the law introduced the secret ballot for magisterial elections. It was followed in 137 BCE by secret voting in jury trials, in 131 BCE for legislative votes, and in 107 BCE for cases of treason.^[5] Citizens now scratched the initials of their preferred candidate onto a small lead or wax tablet and deposited it in a voting urn.

The reform was aimed at reducing the influence of the aristocracy. Under open voting, ordinary citizens had been forced to declare their choices in full view of the powerful; secret voting gave plebeians a measure of freedom they had not had before.^[5] But the fundamental structure of the Roman Republic — a system in which voting units and their relative weight varied according to property class — remained intact. One person, one vote it was not.

The Four Principles Established

The standards by which democratic elections are measured today are commonly grouped into four principles: universal (suffrage for all), equal (each vote carries the same weight), direct (citizens vote without intermediaries), and secret (the ballot is private). The process by which each of these became real law unfolded over centuries, at different speeds in different countries.

Universal Suffrage: Who Gets to Vote

The starting question of modern electoral systems was who had the right to vote. Well into the nineteenth century, most countries limited the franchise to adult men who met a property threshold. In Britain, the Reform Act of 1832 expanded the electorate but still required voters to satisfy property qualifications. Further reforms in 1867 and 1884 gradually extended the vote to urban workers and rural tenant farmers.^[6]

Racial barriers proved more durable. In the United States, the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) prohibited denying the vote on the basis of race, but Southern states used workarounds — literacy tests, poll taxes, whites-only primary elections — to effectively exclude Black voters for decades afterward. Those barriers remained largely in place until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.^[7]

The first country to formally remove the gender barrier was New Zealand. On 19 September 1893, Governor Lord Glasgow signed a new Electoral Act, making New Zealand the first country in the world to grant all adult women the right to vote.^[8] The decision was the culmination of decades of campaigning. Britain extended the vote to women aged thirty and over in 1918, then to all women aged twenty-one and over in 1928. In the United States, the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed women’s suffrage in 1920.^[7]

Age limits shifted as well. In the United States, the backlash during the Vietnam War era — the argument that if you were old enough to be drafted, you were old enough to vote — led to the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in 1971, lowering the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen.^[7] One of the last examples of formal gender exclusion came in Saudi Arabia, where women were permitted for the first time to vote and stand as candidates in municipal council elections in December 2015.^[9]

Equal Suffrage: Does Every Vote Weigh the Same

Having the right to vote and having that vote carry equal weight are two entirely different things.

In Britain, the so-called “rotten boroughs” persisted into the nineteenth century — tiny hamlets returning the same number of MPs as cities with hundreds of thousands of residents. Even into the mid-twentieth century, university graduates in Britain could cast one vote in their residential constituency and a second vote in a separate “university constituency.” This system of plural voting was abolished by the Representation of the People Act 1948.^[10]

In the United States, the Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in Reynolds v. Sims confronted the question directly. The Court struck down Alabama’s legislative apportionment as unconstitutional because state Senate and House districts were not drawn in proportion to population. At the time, the smallest state senate district in Nevada had a population of 568; the largest had 127,000. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the opinion: “Legislators represent people, not trees or acres.”^[11] The “one person, one vote” principle that emerged from this ruling became the foundational standard for U.S. electoral redistricting.

Direct Elections: Do Citizens Vote Directly

Not all elections today use a direct system. The most prominent exception is the U.S. presidential election, where voters do not choose the president directly but instead select electors, and the Electoral College formally elects the president. The history and controversies of that arrangement are covered in detail in Part 2 of this series.

The original U.S. Constitution (1789) required that senators be chosen by their respective state legislatures, not by the people directly. This indirect method frequently produced deadlock and corruption inside state legislatures, and cases of bribery over Senate seats were documented.^[12] Congress finally passed the Seventeenth Amendment in 1912, ratified in 1913, switching U.S. senators to direct popular election.^[12]

The Secret Ballot: A Vote No One Can See

The spread of the Australian secret ballot after 1856 was slower than one might expect. Britain passed the Ballot Act in 1872 to introduce secret voting.^[1] Before that, British voters had been required to register their names and their chosen candidates in public ledgers, and newspapers reported these records openly. Tenants voted as their landlords wished; workers watched what their employers wanted. Alcohol, money, and threats were part of the polling process.^[1] Records from just after 1872 note a visible change in the character of elections.

The United States moved state by state. Massachusetts was the first to adopt the Australian ballot, in 1888, and by the time of the 1896 election most states had followed.^[2] Before that, American political parties printed and distributed their own ballots — each in a distinctive color and size — so that anyone watching the polls could tell at a glance which party’s ballot a voter was carrying.

The Evolution of Voting Tools

As the secret ballot took hold, the tools used to cast votes evolved alongside it.

Standardizing the Paper Ballot

The cornerstone of the Australian secret ballot was a standardized ballot printed by the government. In the original 1856 Victorian model, voters crossed out the names of candidates they did not want; in South Australia, William Boothby devised the alternative of marking an “X” next to the preferred candidate.^[2] Most countries today follow the latter approach.

The Lever Voting Machine: New York, 1892

The drawbacks of paper ballots were the labor required to count them and the errors that counting by hand could introduce. In the United States, suspicions about fraud in manual counting processes drove the development of mechanical voting machines. Jacob H. Myers patented a lever-operated voting machine in 1889, and the first real-election use came in Lockport, New York, in 1892.^[13] The voter pulled down a lever beside the preferred candidate’s name; an internal counter registered the choice automatically. By the mid-twentieth century, a significant share of American cities had adopted these lever machines.

Punch Cards and Optical Scanners: The Late Twentieth Century

A new approach emerged in the 1960s. Political scientist Joseph P. Harris patented the Votomatic punch-card voting system in 1963, and IBM acquired the rights and distributed the machines widely.^[13] Voters punched holes in a paper card; a computer tabulated the results. In the 1996 U.S. presidential election, roughly 40 percent of all votes were counted using the punch-card method. The system entered popular consciousness in the 2000 presidential election through the Florida “hanging chad” controversy — an episode whose full account will be told in Part 2.

At roughly the same time, optical scan voting developed as a parallel technology. Voters filled in circles or connected lines on a paper form, which an optical reader then interpreted. The advantages of accuracy and the availability of a paper trail for recounts meant that by the late twentieth century, a quarter of American voters were already using this method.^[13]

India’s Electronic Voting Machine: The World’s Largest Experiment

The country that has deployed electronic voting machines (EVMs) most extensively is India. The Election Commission of India began examining EVM development in 1977 and completed a prototype in 1979.^[14] The first real-world deployment came in a by-election in Paravur, Kerala, in 1982. The losing candidate contested the result on the grounds that there was no legal basis for EVM use, and the Supreme Court voided the election, ruling that no statute specifically authorized the technology.^[14] Parliament amended the relevant law in 1988, and the rollout was phased in gradually through 1998 and 2003, until the 2004 general election became the first in which every polling station across the country used EVMs.^[14] Approximately 380 million people voted in that election — the largest electronic election in world history.

India’s EVMs were designed as standalone machines with no network connection, a deliberate choice to minimize hacking concerns. The model has since been studied as a reference point in debates about electronic voting adoption in developing countries.

The Weight of One Vote

When the first voting booth was erected in Australia in 1856, one person stepped inside and, for the first time, marked a piece of paper that no one else could see. It looks unremarkable in hindsight. At the time, it was an experiment that overturned centuries of practice.

For readers in the United States and the United Kingdom, the story of the secret ballot has a particularly direct lineage. Britain’s Ballot Act of 1872 was pushed through Parliament after decades of documented coercion at the polls — landlords instructing tenants, employers intimidating workers, candidates treating whole villages to free drinks on polling day.^[1] Massachusetts became the first American state to adopt the Australian model in 1888, and within eight years most other states had followed, largely because reformers could point to the British experience as proof that the system worked.^[2] The reform did not arrive quietly: in both countries, opponents argued that a man who hid his vote was a man with something to hide. The counterargument — that a vote cast in fear is no vote at all — ultimately prevailed, and the private booth became the shared inheritance of every English-speaking democracy.

Universal suffrage was won through decades of struggle. Equal suffrage came through court rulings and legislative reform. Direct elections required constitutional amendments. The secret ballot depended on a private booth and a standardized slip of paper. Even in places where all four principles are formally in place, making them work in practice is a continuing challenge. What happened in the design of electoral systems, the counting of ballots, and the mechanics of the Electoral College is where Part 2 of this series picks up.

Next: Part 2: The Mechanics of Turning Votes into Seats — Electoral Systems, the U.S. Electoral College, and the Count