The History of Elections and Voting — A 2-Part Series

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

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

On the night of November 8, 2000, Theresa LePore, the election supervisor of Palm Beach County, felt as though she might collapse behind her counter. Thousands of ballots rejected by the counting machines were piling up on her desk. The culprit was a tiny scrap of paper — what was called a “hanging chad,” a punch-card perforation that a voter had failed to push all the way through. With just one corner still clinging to the ballot, the machine could not register it as a valid vote. Florida’s margin in the presidential race narrowed to 537 votes, and after 36 days of legal battles, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the recount to stop.^[1]

Those 36 days left people with one persistent question: if the way votes are counted can change outcomes, then who designed the rules that convert votes into seats and power — and are those rules fair?

Part 1 of this series covered the history of the ballot and voting tools. This article takes the next step: how accumulated votes are translated into power. The subjects are types of electoral systems, the origins of the U.S. Electoral College, the politics of redistricting, and the evolution of voting methods.

What Rules Make What Politics: Types of Electoral Systems

Every democracy has rules for converting votes into seats. But the choice of those rules shapes the entire political landscape, because the same voters make very different choices depending on the system they are operating under.

First-Past-the-Post: Only First Place Survives

The simplest approach is First-Past-the-Post (FPTP). The candidate who wins the most votes in a constituency wins the seat — no majority required. A candidate can win with just 30% of the vote if the other candidates split the rest.

Countries that use this system include the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and India. An interesting phenomenon emerges in these countries: third parties that win considerable support nationwide often end up with almost no seats. In the UK’s 2015 general election, for instance, the Liberal Democrats received 7.9% of the national vote but won only 8 of 650 seats.^[2]

French political scientist Maurice Duverger theorized this phenomenon in 1951. Duverger’s law, named after him, operates through two forces. The first is mathematical reality: in a winner-takes-all structure, third parties that split the vote are inevitably disadvantaged. The second is psychological pressure: voters dislike “wasting” a vote on a candidate they believe cannot win. Over time, this tends to compress competition down to two parties.^[2] The law is not absolute, however. Canada uses FPTP yet has maintained four or five competitive parties for decades, and India’s regional parties remain strong.

Two-Round System: Demanding a Majority

The Two-Round System holds a runoff between the top two candidates if no one clears a majority in the first round. France’s presidential election is the clearest example. Introduced by constitutional amendment in 1962, the system was first applied in the 1965 election, and since then not a single French presidential race has been decided in the first round.^[3]

The two-round system gives third-party candidates a chance to reach the top tier in round one, but ultimately forces voters to choose between two people in round two. France’s 2002 presidential election showed the system’s extremes. A crowded left-wing field fragmented the vote in the first round, allowing the far-right candidate to finish second and advance to the runoff, where centrist and left-leaning voters held their noses and backed the center-right incumbent, who won in a landslide.^[3]

Proportional Representation: Matching Seats to Votes

Proportional Representation (PR) allocates seats in proportion to each party’s nationwide share of the vote. A party that wins 10% of votes gets roughly 10% of seats. Countries like the Netherlands and Israel apply this principle in its purest form.

Germany uses a hybrid known as Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) representation. Voters cast two ballots — one for a local constituency candidate and one for a party. Half the seats are filled by constituency plurality winners; the other half are filled according to party vote share. Each party’s total number of seats is then adjusted to match its national vote share.^[4] This system was introduced with the founding of West Germany in 1949 and has since been adopted in modified forms by New Zealand (1996), Japan, South Korea, and others.

There is a common assumption that proportional representation is inherently more democratic than first-past-the-post. But critics push back. While PR does help small parties win representation, it also tends to make coalition governments unavoidable and can complicate policy-making. In highly fragmented multi-party environments like Israel’s, minor extremist parties have at times held the balance of power in coalition negotiations, wielding disproportionate influence. No system is perfect, and each country has made different choices shaped by its own historical context.

Ranked-Choice Voting and STV: Ordering Preferences

Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV), also known as Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV), asks voters to rank candidates in order of preference — first choice, second choice, third choice. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated and the votes of people who ranked that candidate first are redistributed to their second choices. The process repeats until someone clears a majority.

Australia introduced this system for its House of Representatives elections in 1918 and continues to use it today.^[5] The ruling Nationalist Party adopted it at the time to prevent vote-splitting with the Country Party, which drew support from the same rural constituencies. In the United States, Maine (2018) and Alaska (2022) have since adopted RCV for federal elections.

The Single Transferable Vote (STV) applies ranked-choice voting to multi-winner constituencies. The Irish parliament (which adopted it in 1921) and the Australian Senate are the most prominent examples. When a candidate exceeds the minimum vote threshold needed to win a seat, surplus votes are transferred to voters’ next preferences. The calculation is complex, but the system captures voter preferences with considerably more precision.^[5]

The U.S. Electoral College: A Product of Compromise

The way the United States elects its president is unlike any other system in the world. American citizens do not vote directly for president. Strictly speaking, they elect electors in each state, and those electors — collectively known as the Electoral College — choose the president. A candidate must secure at least 270 of the 538 total electoral votes to win.

The 1787 Compromise: Why Was This System Created?

The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 produced fierce debate over how to elect the president. Three proposals competed: selection by Congress, selection by state legislatures, and direct election by citizens.

Direct election faced two substantial barriers. First, in eighteenth-century America, voters had no reliable way to learn about candidates from other states — information traveled only as fast as a horse. Second, and more decisively, Southern states were opposed. Under a direct popular vote, the slaveholding South would be at a disadvantage, because enslaved people had no voting rights and the region’s effective voting population was far smaller relative to its total population.^[6]

The Electoral College was the compromise that resolved this conflict. Each state’s number of electors was set equal to the combined total of its House seats and its two Senate seats. House seats were apportioned by population, but under the Three-Fifths Compromise, enslaved persons counted as three-fifths of a free person. This arrangement gave Virginia roughly a quarter of the entire Electoral College’s influence in the early 1800s.^[6] In practical terms, Southern states gained more political representation than their actual voting populations warranted — because of the very people they denied the right to vote.

The Tie of 1800 and the Twelfth Amendment

The system quickly ran into an unforeseen problem. In the 1800 presidential election, Thomas Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr each received 73 electoral votes. The original Constitution did not distinguish between votes for president and votes for vice president — electors simply wrote two names, which meant that a party’s joint ticket could end in a tie between its own candidates.

The House of Representatives ultimately resolved the deadlock on its thirty-sixth ballot, electing Jefferson president.^[7] To prevent a recurrence, the Twelfth Amendment was ratified in 1804, requiring electors to cast separate ballots for president and vice president.

Winner-Takes-All and the Popular Vote Gap

Today, 48 states (all except Maine and Nebraska) use a winner-takes-all rule: a candidate who wins a state by even a single vote claims all of that state’s electoral votes. Maine and Nebraska split their electoral votes — two go to the statewide winner and the rest are allocated by congressional district.^[8]

This structure creates a logical paradox: the national popular vote total — the sum of every American voter’s choice — can diverge from the actual electoral outcome. In U.S. history, this has happened five times.^[8]

• 1824: Andrew Jackson led in the popular vote but fell short of an Electoral College majority; the House chose John Quincy Adams.
• 1876: Samuel Tilden led nationally but Rutherford B. Hayes won the Electoral College.
• 1888: Grover Cleveland led the national popular vote by more than 90,000 votes, but Benjamin Harrison won the presidency.
• 2000: Al Gore led the national popular vote by about 540,000 votes, but George W. Bush won because of a 537-vote margin in Florida.
• 2016: Hillary Clinton led the national popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes, but Donald Trump won the Electoral College.

These outcomes prompt fundamental questions about the Electoral College. Reforming the system, however, requires a constitutional amendment, and smaller states are reluctant to support changes that would reduce their political weight under a direct popular vote, making reform consistently difficult.

Gerrymandering: When District Lines Decide Elections

In February 1812, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed a bill redrawing the state senate districts to favor his own Democratic-Republican Party. A Boston newspaper editor took one look at the newly drawn Essex County district and exclaimed, “It looks just like a salamander!” The poet Richard Alsop, standing nearby, shot back: “Not a salamander — a Gerry-mander.”^[9]

That coinage appeared in the Boston Gazette on March 26, 1812, and entered the English language permanently. Artist Elkanah Tisdale’s cartoon depicting the district as a winged monster became a classic of political satire.

The two core techniques of gerrymandering are known as packing and cracking.

Packing concentrates the opposing party’s supporters into as few districts as possible. Even if the other side wins those districts by enormous margins, it cannot deploy that energy elsewhere.

Cracking breaks up areas where the opposing party’s supporters are concentrated by splitting them across multiple districts. This ensures the opposition cannot form a majority in any single district.^[9]

Combining these two techniques, a single party can win 70–80% of seats even when the statewide vote is nearly evenly divided.

Modern computing and big data have dramatically sharpened the precision of gerrymandering. With block-level demographic and political data, a district map optimized for one party can be generated in minutes. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering is “incompatible with democratic principles” — but also held, 5 to 4, that federal courts lack the authority to review it.^[10] The decision spurred a movement to establish independent redistricting commissions at the state level.

Early Voting and Mail Voting: A System Born on the Battlefield

Voting was originally permitted only on Election Day, in person, at a designated location. The first crack in that principle came on the battlefield.

In 1864, with the Civil War still raging, Abraham Lincoln faced a precarious path to reelection. Hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers who supported the war effort — and Lincoln’s prosecution of it — were pinned down at the front. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton argued that a way had to be found for them to vote. Nineteen states passed legislation permitting absentee voting, and some states set up polling places directly in military camps.^[11] Lincoln won roughly 78% of the soldier vote and secured reelection. The precedent lingered long after the war ended: it was morally difficult to argue that those who fought for the country should have no say in choosing its leaders.

Through the twentieth century, absentee voting gradually expanded to the general public. From the 1970s onward, many U.S. states began allowing “no-excuse absentee voting,” permitting any registered voter to request a mail ballot without providing a specific reason. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 accelerated this trend dramatically. Mail ballot volumes surged to unprecedented levels in that year’s presidential election, and a fierce political debate over the integrity of mail voting followed. Researchers, however, have consistently confirmed that mail ballot fraud rates are extremely low.^[11]

For the United Kingdom and much of the English-speaking world, the history of absentee voting carries a particular resonance. British soldiers who served in two world wars were among the most prominent beneficiaries of expanded mail voting provisions, and their experience helped normalize the idea that geography and circumstance should not strip a citizen of the vote.

Australia took a different path, adopting compulsory voting for its own reasons. When federal election turnout fell below 60% in 1922, the federal parliament passed the Commonwealth Electoral Act in 1924, requiring all registered voters to cast a ballot or face a fine. Turnout shot past 91% at the very next election.^[12] Australia’s participation rates have remained in the mid-to-upper 90s ever since. Senator Herbert Payne, who championed the measure, described it as a safeguard against voter “indifference and neglect.”

The Birth and Pitfalls of the Exit Poll

Exit polls — surveys of voters as they leave polling stations — are now a standard feature of election night broadcasts. Their origin traces to 1967.

Warren Mitofsky was the head of CBS News’s election and survey research unit. He developed the idea of asking voters directly as they exited a polling place whom they had just voted for. Since the interview happened moments after the actual vote, respondents had little reason to distort their answers, and a sufficiently large sample could yield quite accurate predictions. The method was tested at the 1967 Kentucky gubernatorial election, where it succeeded, and then became the standard for election coverage across the United States.^[13]

Florida in 2000 became the most famous failure in exit polling history. Early on election night, the networks used their exit poll data to call Florida for Al Gore. As actual vote counts came in, the call flipped. By the end of the night, the networks had changed their Florida projection twice. Post-mortems found that the data had insufficiently accounted for mail-in absentee ballots, which skewed differently from in-person votes.^[13] The episode made broadcasters far more cautious about how they used exit poll results. In 2002, the joint exit polling operation that the major networks had shared was dissolved, and Mitofsky was asked to lead a new consortium in its place.

Unusual Corners of Electoral History

Not every democracy settles votes the same way.

Swiss direct democracy runs the world’s most extensive referendum system. When the federal constitution was drafted in 1848, it required a mandatory national referendum for any constitutional amendment. More than a third of all national-level referendums ever held worldwide have taken place in Switzerland.^[14] Citizens can also trigger a popular vote on any federal law or constitutional provision if they gather enough signatures. The system functions as a check on representative democracy, giving the public the power to overturn parliamentary decisions or force new items onto the agenda.

The papal conclave is one of the oldest forms of secret ballot in the world. Pope Gregory X established the conclave rules at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, a response to a papal election in 1271 that had dragged on for nearly three years.^[15] Cardinals are locked inside the Sistine Chapel, cut off from the outside world, and vote repeatedly until a candidate receives at least two-thirds support. The result is communicated by burning ballots and releasing smoke. Inconclusive rounds produce black smoke; the election of a new pope produces white smoke. The white smoke tradition is believed to have been formalized with the election of Pope Benedict XV in 1914.^[15] Most recently, in May 2025, following the death of Pope Francis, a conclave elected Cardinal Roberto Prevost as Pope Leo XIV — and white smoke rose over Rome once more.

The Rules That Reshape Votes Reshape Power Itself

Let us return to that small scrap of paper in Florida in 2000. The hanging chad appeared to change history — but what the episode actually revealed runs deeper. Electoral outcomes depend not only on how many votes are cast, but on the rules that govern how votes are counted.

First-past-the-post builds two-party systems. Proportional representation produces multi-party coalitions. The Electoral College assigns extra weight to smaller states. Gerrymandering designs outcomes on a map before the first vote is cast. Compulsory voting pulls the silent majority into the polling booth. Exit polls, by projecting results before all votes are counted, can even influence the behavior of voters who have not yet gone to the polls.

None of these systems is neutral. Each was designed within a specific historical context, as a resolution to a specific conflict of interests. That is why democracy is not simply a matter of the ballot box. What determines the substance of democracy is every rule surrounding that box — who writes those rules, and who has the power to change them.

Previous: Part 1: How One Vote Became One Vote — The Principles and Tools of the Ballot