Based on Wikipedia: Voting

In the Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden, citizens still gather in a public square once a year to vote by raising their hands. No secret ballots. No voting booths. Just arms in the air, visible to neighbors and strangers alike, in a tradition called the Landsgemeinde that dates back centuries.

Meanwhile, in the West African nation of Gambia, voters drop marbles into painted metal drums. A bell rings with each vote. The system was designed in 1965 to accommodate citizens who couldn't read—a practical solution that turned the abstract act of voting into something you could hear.

These examples sit at opposite ends of a vast spectrum. Voting is how groups of people who disagree with each other manage to make decisions without resorting to violence. It's democracy's essential mechanism, but also humanity's broader tool for collective choice. A jury delivers a verdict. A family picks a restaurant. A corporate board selects a new chief executive. All voting.

The Secret Ballot Revolution

For most of human history, voting was public. You stood up. You raised your hand. Everyone saw.

This creates an obvious problem. If your landlord can see how you vote, your vote isn't really free. If your employer knows, your job might depend on your politics. If your neighbors are watching, social pressure shapes what should be a private judgment.

The secret ballot—sometimes called the Australian ballot because Australia pioneered its modern form in the 1850s—changed everything. By hiding individual choices while counting aggregate results, it severs the connection between how you vote and what happens to you afterward. No one can punish you for your vote if no one knows what it was.

Today, all modern liberal democracies use secret ballots. The goal is authenticity: letting people express what they actually think rather than what they're pressured to say. It's a technology for extracting truth from a population.

But secrecy comes with trade-offs. You can't verify that your vote was counted correctly if you can't see it being counted. And secrecy enables another behavior that troubles democratic theorists: the protest vote, the strategic vote, the vote cast for expressive reasons rather than sincere preferences. These aren't necessarily problems, but they're consequences of the privacy that secret balloting provides.

The Bewildering Menu of Voting Systems

Here's where things get complicated. "Voting" sounds simple—you pick what you want. But how votes translate into outcomes varies dramatically, and these differences matter enormously.

The simplest system gives each voter one choice. Mark an X next to your preferred candidate. Whoever gets the most X's wins. This is called first-past-the-post, and it's what the United Kingdom and the United States use for most elections.

The problem? In a race with three candidates, you can win with 34 percent of the vote. The majority—66 percent—voted against you. And it gets worse with more candidates. In some primary elections in the United States, winners have emerged with barely 20 percent support.

Ranked-choice voting attempts to fix this. Instead of marking one X, you rank candidates: first choice, second choice, third choice, and so on. If no one wins a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes gets eliminated, and their voters' second choices get redistributed. The process repeats until someone crosses 50 percent.

Australia uses this system for its House of Representatives. Ireland uses a related method called the Single Transferable Vote, or STV, which extends the ranking principle to multi-member districts—elections where multiple candidates win seats rather than just one.

Then there's approval voting, which takes a different approach entirely. Instead of picking one candidate or ranking them, you simply approve or disapprove of each one. Vote for as many as you like. The candidate with the most approvals wins.

Cumulative voting gives you multiple votes to distribute however you want. You could put all your votes on one candidate you love, or spread them across several you like.

Score voting, sometimes called range voting, asks you to rate each candidate on a scale—say, zero to ten. The candidate with the highest average score wins.

Each system has passionate advocates and sharp critics. First-past-the-post is simple but often produces winners most people didn't want. Ranked-choice voting is fairer but confusing and can produce paradoxical results. Approval voting is intuitive but doesn't capture intensity of preference. The debate over which system best translates individual preferences into collective decisions has occupied mathematicians, economists, and political theorists for centuries—and remains unresolved.

How Ballots Actually Work

The physical or digital object you interact with when voting varies as much as the systems themselves.

In the United States, you typically mark a paper ballot or touch a screen. But in Israel, things work differently. You enter a polling booth and find a tray containing small paper slips, each marked with the letter or letters assigned to a political party. You select the slip for your preferred party, place it in an envelope, and drop the envelope in a box. Latvia uses the same system.

In nineteenth-century western Canada, voters used the Oliver ballot—a blank paper and a set of colored pencils, each color representing a different candidate. You made a mark with your chosen color.

The Gambian marble system deserves more detail. Polling stations contain metal drums painted in party colors with candidates' photos attached. You receive a marble. You drop it in the drum of your choice. A bell rings to confirm the vote registered. One quirk: bicycles are banned near polling stations on election day to prevent the sound of bells from confusing the count.

The marble system emerged from necessity—how do you run elections in a country where many voters can't read? But it's also genuinely clever. The bell provides instant feedback that your vote counted. The physical act of dropping a marble is harder to mess up than filling in bubbles or navigating screens. And the system is almost impossible to hack remotely.

When People Choose Not to Vote

In South Africa, a campaign emerged with a striking slogan: "No Land! No House! No Vote!"

The argument wasn't apathy. It was structural: no political party truly represented the interests of the poorest citizens. Voting, from this perspective, meant legitimizing a system that had failed them. The campaign was supported by three of South Africa's largest social movements—the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and the Landless Peoples Movement.

This isn't unique to South Africa. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico has long rejected participation in electoral politics. Various anarchist movements worldwide share this position, arguing that voting in state elections validates state power itself.

Even within systems that mandate voting—Australia imposes fines for not showing up—people find ways to abstain. Some cast blank ballots: fulfilling the legal requirement to vote without selecting anyone. Others deliberately spoil their ballots, marking them in ways that invalidate the vote. In some jurisdictions, "none of the above" is an official option that gets counted.

These behaviors raise philosophical questions. Is there a moral obligation to vote? Does non-participation strengthen or weaken unjust systems? The debate remains unresolved, and different traditions reach different conclusions.

The Problem of the Uninformed Voter

Starting in the 1950s, researchers at the University of Michigan began publishing findings that troubled democratic theorists. Many voters, the studies found, lacked basic knowledge about current issues. They couldn't place candidates on an ideological spectrum. They didn't understand policy implications.

This raises an uncomfortable question: if voting is supposed to aggregate the wisdom of the people, what happens when the people aren't wise? When voters don't know what they're voting for?

One response: maybe it doesn't matter. Perhaps voters don't need to understand policy details if they can evaluate outcomes. Did my life get better or worse over the past four years? This retrospective voting—judging incumbents by results rather than promises—suggests voters can hold leaders accountable without understanding every policy nuance.

Another response: help voters learn. Voting advice applications—digital tools that quiz users on their positions and match them with compatible candidates—have proliferated in recent years. Whether they actually improve democratic outcomes remains debated.

A third response: maybe expertise should matter more. Some theorists argue for weighted voting systems that give more educated voters more influence, or for epistocracy—rule by the knowledgeable—rather than democracy. These proposals remain deeply controversial and largely unimplemented.

The research also found something else: voters often make decisions based on candidates' physical appearance. Height. Facial structure. Perceived competence based on looks alone. This suggests that democratic elections may be measuring something quite different from what we assume.

Solidarity and the Social Dimension of Voting

Voting isn't just individual preference aggregation. It's also a social act.

Solidarity voting describes electoral behavior where people vote based on group identity and collective interest rather than narrow self-interest. In the European Union, research on the 2019 European Parliament elections found that voters' preferences for European solidarity—willingness to share economic risks and redistribute resources across member states—significantly influenced how they voted.

In the United States, solidarity voting manifests differently. Research suggests that emphasizing shared experiences of discrimination can create a sense of common identity among Black, Latino, and Asian Americans—what researchers call a People of Color superordinate identity. This solidarity doesn't always directly change votes, but it can do so indirectly by strengthening feelings of group connection.

The phenomenon also appears in union elections. Studies show that workgroup solidarity—the aggregate attitudes of your coworkers toward unionization—predicts individual voting behavior independent of personal attitudes. People vote with their peers, partly from genuine agreement and partly from the desire to maintain good relationships with colleagues.

This complicates the story about voting as expression of individual preference. Votes emerge from social contexts. They reflect relationships, identities, and norms—not just isolated judgments about candidates and policies.

Religious Perspectives on Voting

Not everyone believes voting is a civic duty. For some, it's a religious question—and the answers vary dramatically.

Christadelphians, Jehovah's Witnesses, Old Order Amish, and Rastafarians generally abstain from voting. The reasoning differs among groups, but often involves a belief that political participation compromises spiritual commitments or allegiance to divine authority.

The Assemblies of Yahweh, a Sacred Name religious movement, frames the issue theologically. Their argument: Jesus did not participate in partisan politics and taught that his kingdom is not of this world. Believers are ambassadors of God's coming Kingdom, with their primary citizenship in heaven. Therefore, allegiance to earthly political parties conflicts with allegiance to God.

Importantly, this doesn't mean rejecting civil order. The teaching distinguishes between voting—which involves taking sides in political competition—and obeying civil laws and paying taxes, which believers should do insofar as those laws don't conflict with divine commandments.

Jewish tradition takes a different view. Rabbis across denominations encourage voting, and some consider it a religious obligation. The Catholic Church teaches similarly: voting is morally obligatory, a duty of citizenship that Catholics should fulfill.

These divergent positions reflect deeper theological commitments about the relationship between earthly and divine authority, the nature of citizenship, and the proper role of believers in secular society.

The Mechanics of Collective Decision-Making

Voting isn't limited to political elections. Whenever a group that disagrees needs to reach a decision peacefully, some form of voting typically emerges.

Deliberative assemblies—bodies that use parliamentary procedure—employ several methods. Voice voting is the simplest: those in favor say aye, those opposed say no, and the chair judges which side was louder. Rising votes make counting easier: stand if you're in favor, remain seated if opposed. Show of hands works similarly.

For more formal situations, recorded votes capture individual positions for the record. Balloting provides secrecy when needed. The assembly itself can decide which method to use by adopting a motion specifying the voting procedure.

Corporate boards vote on business decisions. Juries vote on verdicts—though in many jurisdictions, criminal convictions require unanimity, not mere majority. Clubs and social organizations vote on membership, sometimes using systems with deep historical roots.

The practice of blackballing comes from such a system. Prospective members face a vote where current members secretly place either a white ball for support or a black ball for opposition into a container. In some clubs, a single black ball was enough to reject the applicant. The term entered common usage to describe social exclusion or veto.

The Never-Ending Debate

How should votes translate into power? The question has no final answer.

More than five hundred national referendums have been held worldwide since the late eighteenth century. Switzerland alone accounts for over three hundred of them. Most are binary—yes or no—but multi-option referendums exist too. New Zealand held a five-option referendum in 1992. Guam held a six-option plebiscite in 1982, which cleverly included a blank option for voters who wanted to campaign for a seventh choice.

Proxy voting allows someone who can't attend to delegate their vote to someone who can. This is not the same as liquid democracy, a newer concept where delegation can be recursive—you delegate to someone who delegates to someone else—and delegation can vary by topic.

Online voting has emerged in some countries. Estonia pioneered the practice in its 2005 local elections and has continued expanding it since. The security concerns are significant—how do you verify votes without compromising anonymity?—but the convenience gains are real.

Postal voting allows participation without traveling to polling places. Some countries have expanded it dramatically; others restrict it tightly, worried about fraud or coercion.

Compulsory voting exists in Australia and roughly two dozen other countries. If you don't show up, you're fined. Advocates argue this produces more representative outcomes and reduces the distorting effect of differential turnout. Critics argue that forced participation isn't meaningful participation.

Each reform proposal reflects underlying values: Should voting be easy or should it require effort? Should individual preferences be expressed simply or with nuance? Should majorities always win, or should minorities have protections? Should participation be universal or restricted to the informed?

These debates will continue as long as humans need to make collective decisions. The technology changes—from raised hands to marbles to touchscreens—but the fundamental challenge remains: how do we translate many individual views into one collective choice?

There is no perfect answer. Every voting system makes trade-offs. Every method can be gamed. Every reform creates new problems while solving old ones.

But the alternative to voting is worse. When groups that disagree can't resolve differences through ballots, they often resolve them through bullets. Voting, for all its flaws, is civilization's technology for peaceful disagreement. It's how we fight without fighting.

The next time you mark a ballot, drop a marble, or raise your hand, you're participating in something ancient and ongoing: humanity's imperfect but essential experiment in governing itself.