An election is a group decision-making process whereby a portion or all of a population or group votes to choose an individual or multiple individuals to hold public office or other position of responsibility.
Elections have been the usual mechanism by which representative democracy has operated since the 17th century. Elections may fill offices in the legislature, sometimes in the executive and judiciary, and for regional and local government, such as cities or towns. This process is also used in many other Standardized Associations, public businesses, and organizations, from clubs to voluntary association and corporations.
The global use of elections as a tool for selecting representatives in modern representative democracies is in contrast with the practice in the democratic archetype, ancient Athens, where the elections were considered an oligarchic institution and most political offices were filled using allotment which is also known as "Sortition", by which office holders were chosen by lot.
Electoral reform describes the process of introducing fair electoral systems where they are not in place, or improving the fairness or effectiveness of existing systems.
Psephology is the study of results and other statistics relating to elections (especially with a view to predicting future results).
The term elect means "to select or to nominate", so sometimes other forms of balloting such as referendums are referred to as elections, especially in the United States.
History
Elections were used as early in history as ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and throughout the Medieval period to select rulers such as the Holy Roman Emperor (see imperial election) and the pope (see papal election)."Election (political science)". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 18 August 2009
The Pala King Gopala (ruled – 770s CE) in early medieval Bengal was elected by a group of feudal chieftains. Such elections were quite common in contemporary societies of the region. In the Chola Empire, around 920 CE, in Uthiramerur (in present-day Tamil Nadu), palm leaves were used for selecting the village committee members. The leaves, with candidate names written on them, were put inside a mud pot. To select the committee members, a young boy was asked to take out as many leaves as the number of positions available. This was known as the Kudavolai system.
The first recorded popular elections of officials in public office, where all citizens were eligible both to vote and to hold public office, date back to the Ephors of Sparta in 754 BC, under the mixed government of the Spartan Constitution when a multiple-winner plurality-style election system and voice voting was used. Athenian democratic elections, where all citizens could hold public office, were not introduced for another 247 years, until the reforms of Cleisthenes. Under the earlier Solonian Constitution (), all Athenian citizens were eligible to vote in the popular assemblies, on matters of law and policy, and as jurors, but only the three highest classes of citizens could vote in elections. Nor were the lowest of the four classes of Athenian citizens (as defined by the extent of their wealth and property, rather than by birth) eligible to hold public office, through the reforms of Solon. The Spartan election of the Ephors, therefore, also predates the reforms of Solon in Athens by approximately 180 years.
Questions of suffrage, especially suffrage for minority groups, have dominated the history of elections. Males, the dominant cultural group in North America and Europe, often dominated the electorate and continue to do so in many countries. Early elections in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States were dominated by landed or ruling class males. By 1920 all Western European and North American democracies had universal adult male suffrage (except Switzerland) and many countries began to consider women's suffrage. Despite legally mandated universal suffrage for adult males, political barriers were sometimes erected to prevent fair access to elections (see civil rights movement).
Contexts Elections are held in a variety of political, organizational, and corporate settings. Many countries hold elections to select people to serve in their governments, but other types of organizations hold elections as well. For example, many corporations hold elections among shareholders to select a board of directors, and these elections may be mandated by corporate law. In many places, an election to the government is usually a competition among people who have already won a primary election within a political party. Elections within corporations and other organizations often use procedures and rules that are similar to those of governmental elections.
Electorate
Suffrage The question of who may vote is a central issue in elections. The electorate does not generally include the entire population; for example, many countries prohibit those who are under the age of majority from voting. All jurisdictions require a minimum age for voting.
In Australia, Aboriginal people were not given the right to vote until 1962 (see 1967 referendum entry) and in 2010 the federal government removed the rights of prisoners serving for three years or more to vote (a large proportion of whom were Aboriginal Australians).
Suffrage is limited to citizens of the country to ensure equal voting rights ("One man, one vote"). Persons with multiple citizenships voting in multiple countries would violate the equal representation in voting.
In the European Union, one can vote in municipal elections if one lives in the municipality and is an EU citizen; the nationality of the country of residence is not required.
In some countries, voting is required by law. Eligible voters may be subject to punitive measures such as a fine for not casting a vote. In Western Australia, the penalty for a first time offender failing to vote is a $20.00 fine, which increases to $50.00 if the offender refused to vote prior.
Voting population Historically the size of eligible voters, the electorate, was small due to the size of groups or communities and to the limited number privileged to vote like aristocrats and men of a city (citizens).
With more people having bourgeois citizen rights outside of cities, expanding the term citizen, the electorates grew to numbers beyond the thousands. Elections with an electorate in the hundred thousands appeared in the final decades of the Roman Republic, by extending voting rights to citizens outside of Rome with the Lex Julia of 90 BC, reaching an electorate of 910,000 and estimated voter turnout of maximum 10% in 70 BC,Vishnia 2012, p. 125 only again comparable in size to the first elections of the United States. At the same time the Kingdom of Great Britain had in 1780 about 214,000 eligible voters, 3% of the whole population. Naturalization can reshape the electorate of a country.
Candidates A representative democracy requires a procedure to govern nomination for political office. In many cases, nomination for office is mediated through preselection processes in organized political parties.Reuven Hazan, 'Candidate Selection', in Lawrence LeDuc, Richard Niemi and Pippa Norris (eds), Comparing Democracies 2, Sage Publications, London, 2002
Non-partisan systems tend to be different from partisan systems as concerns nominations. In a direct democracy, one type of non-partisan democracy, any eligible person can be nominated. Although elections were used in ancient Athens, in Rome, and in the selection of popes and Holy Roman emperors, the origins of elections in the contemporary world lie in the gradual emergence of representative government in Europe and North America beginning in the 17th century. In some systems no nominations take place at all, with voters free to choose any person at the time of voting—with some possible exceptions such as through a minimum age requirement—in the jurisdiction. In such cases, it is not required (or even possible) that the members of the electorate be familiar with all of the eligible persons, though such systems may involve indirect elections at larger geographic levels to ensure that some first-hand familiarity among potential electees can exist at these levels (i.e., among the elected delegates).
Electability of a candidate is connected to the likelihood a candidate is elected.
Systems
In a democracy, the members of the government are elected by a portion of the people who vote in an election. Elections are a way for an electorate to elect, that is choose, from two or more different candidates.
Many countries in the world see elections fought principally between two opposing parties, known as a two-party system. These two will be the most established and most popular parties in the country. For example, in the US, the competition is between the Republicans and the Democrats. Many other countries have multi-party systems where different socio-economic classes, ethnic and racial groups, regions and other diversities each have their own party.
In an indirect or representative democracy, voting and elections are the method by which the people choose the people who will represent them, whilst making decisions. Under Direct democracy the people vote to show their preferences to make policy decisions directly without selecting a representative to decide for them.
A majority vote is when more than half of voters vote for the same person or party. This happens any time only two are in the running for a post but only sometimes when two or more candidates are in the running. Plurality is when the successful candidate or candidates are decided just by relative strength, having more votes than the other candidates, whether in a multiple-winner context or in a single-winner context.
Many countries use a combination of factors to decide who has power, not the at-large "popular vote" using either the majority or plurality method. Most influential of these factors are districts that divide the electorate. For example, in any country where first past the post is used in numerous separate districts such as the UK, a party winning plurality in a majority of constituencies wins majority government, but they often do not have a majority of votes, and sometimes not even the most individual votes (i.e. another party may have more votes but the party still takes more seats). (It is possible for a party to win plurality in a minority of constituencies (but more than any other one party) and thus win minority government.)
Electoral systems consist of the detailed constitutional arrangements and voting systems that convert the vote into a political decision.
The first step is for each voter to cast a ballot, which may be a simple single-choice ballot or another type such as multiple choice or a ranked ballot. Then the votes (either taken at-large or in electoral districts) are tallied, for which various vote counting systems may be used. The voting system then allocates the seats on the basis of the tally. Most systems allocate seats based on relative strength (pluralities), majorities, or proportional representation, or a a mixture of these systems.
Among the proportional systems, the most commonly used are party-list proportional representation (list PR). Among majority- or plurality-based systems the common systems include first-past-the-post electoral system (single winner plurality voting) and different methods of majority voting (such as the widely used two-round system). Mixed systems combine elements of both proportional and majoritarian/plurality systems, with some (mixed-member proportional) typically producing results closer to the former and others (e.g. parallel voting) sometimes having just as much dis-proportionality as first past the post.