Ancient Athenians considered elections undemocratic and picked officials by lot
Voting for representatives feels like the essence of democracy, but in classical Athens it was seen as an oligarchic device that favoured the prominent. Most offices there were filled by sortition, drawing names at random. Elections became the standard engine of representative government only from the seventeenth century.
An election is a group decision in which some or all members vote to choose people for office. The word elect simply means to select, which is why Americans sometimes call referendums elections too. Studying results and predicting future ones has its own name, psephology.
The earliest recorded popular elections, in which every citizen could vote and stand for office, chose the ephors of Sparta in 754 BC, using voice votes to fill several seats at once. Athens gained comparable elections only with the reforms of Cleisthenes some 247 years later. Across medieval Europe, electors chose Holy Roman Emperors and popes. In early medieval Bengal, feudal chiefs elected the Pala king Gopala around the 750s, and in the Chola Empire around 920, the village of Uthiramerur in modern Tamil Nadu picked committee members by writing candidates' names on palm leaves, placing them in a clay pot and having a young boy draw out one per seat, a method called Kudavolai.
Electorates were long tiny. The Roman Republic's Lex Julia of 90 BC extended voting beyond Rome and produced a roll of about 910,000 by 70 BC, though turnout may have been at most 10%; nothing comparable appeared again until early American elections. Great Britain in 1780 had about 214,000 eligible voters, roughly 3% of its people. Landed and ruling-class men dominated early elections in Britain and the United States, and by 1920 every Western European and North American democracy except Switzerland had universal adult male suffrage, with women's votes under debate.
Who counts as a voter still shapes results. Australia withheld the vote from Aboriginal people until 1962, and in 2010 barred prisoners serving three years or more, many of them Aboriginal. Some countries make voting compulsory: Western Australia fines a first-time non-voter 20 dollars, rising to 50 for repeat refusers. In the European Union, residents who are citizens of any member state may vote in local elections wherever they live.
Source: Election
