Ballot
Ballot entered English in the mid-sixteenth century from Italian *ballotta*, a diminutive of *balla* meaning 'ball'. The method of voting by ball — dropping a small sphere into a container to register a secret choice — gave the English language one of its most enduring political terms.
Historical Journey
The Italian *balla* derived from a Germanic source, reconstructed as *\*ballō*, related to Old High German *balla* and Old Norse *böllr*, all pointing to a Proto-Germanic *\*balluz* ('round object'). Some linguists trace this further to a Proto-Indo-European root *\*bʰel-* ('to blow, swell'), which also underlies English *ball*, *balloon*, and *boulder*.
The practice the word names is ancient. Athenian courts cast verdicts using small stones (*psēphoi*), and the Greek verb *psēphízesthai* ('to vote') derives directly from this. The Romans used similar ceramic or wooden tokens. But it was the northern Italian city-states of the medieval period — Venice in particular — where the ball-based ballot system became formalized into civic ritual.
Venetian electoral procedure, by the thirteenth century, relied on small gilded balls dropped into urns. A positive vote used a gold ball; a negative, a silver one. This system spread through Italian commercial and political networks. By the 1540s, the word *ballot* appears in English texts describing continental voting procedures. Francis Bacon and other writers of the late sixteenth century used it, and by the seventeenth century it was naturalized into English political vocabulary.
The Secret Ballot
The phrase 'secret ballot' carries some redundancy: the original technology was designed precisely for secrecy. The container — often a box or urn with two chambers — allowed the voter to deposit their ball without observers knowing which way it fell. This mechanical anonymity was the point. The shift from balls to paper slips happened gradually through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the word remained.
The Australian ballot, a reform model adopted in the 1850s and spreading to the United States by the 1880s, standardized the printed, government-issued paper ballot and is credited with substantially reducing electoral fraud. The term 'Australian' attached because the reform originated there, not because anything in the word's etymology points to the southern hemisphere.
Root Analysis
The reconstructed PIE root *\*bʰel-* ('to blow, swell, inflate') is unusually productive. Its descendants include:
- *ball* (round object) - *balloon* (via French *ballon*, Italian *ballone*, augmentative of *balla*) - *bollard* (via a nautical Germanic form) - *boulder* (possibly, via a Scandinavian root for rounded stone) - *phallus* (via Greek, from the same sense of swelling) - *fool* (via Old French *fol*, from Latin *follis*, 'bellows, windbag')
The semantic thread across all these is roundness or inflation — something that swells outward from a center.
Cultural Context and Semantic Shifts
The word carried its physical meaning transparently for centuries. To 'ballot' was to drop a ball, and a ballot *was* a ball. The abstraction — from object to process to document — mirrors the history of many voting technologies: the thing used to vote became the name for the vote itself.
In English, 'ballot' has expanded to cover any formal written vote: a union ballot, a party leadership ballot, a sports hall-of-fame ballot. The original technology has vanished; the word persists. This is a common pattern in political vocabulary — *franchise*, *suffrage*, *poll* each embed archaic physical or legal realities that modern usage has long since dissolved.
Blackballing
One branch of the original meaning survived in a negative form. 'Blackballing' — rejecting a candidate from a club or society — preserves the literal ball mechanism. Many gentlemen's clubs well into the twentieth century used actual black and white balls for membership votes; a single black ball could veto admission. The practice was private, the balls were real, and the word records both facts exactly.
Cognates and Relatives
- Italian *ballotta* — the direct source - French *ballotte* — adopted from Italian - Spanish *balota* — used in some Latin American electoral contexts - German *Ballotage* — the process of voting by ballot - Greek *psēphos* — functionally equivalent (vote-by-stone), etymologically unrelated
Modern Usage
The word today operates entirely at the level of procedure and democracy, stripped of its material origin. 'Cast a ballot', 'count the ballots', 'ballot measure' — none of these phrases conjures a ball. The physicality has gone so completely that the word reads as an abstraction. Yet it arrived in English as the name of a specific object small enough to hold in a closed fist, designed to hide a citizen's choice from everyone else in the room.