Election
An election is a formal group decision-making process whereby a portion or all of a population or group votes to chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold public office or other position of responsibility.
Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern 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.
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 and the pope.The Pala King Gopala 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, 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 to public office, by majority vote, 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. 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 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.
File:Election of Paasikivi.jpg|thumb|In 1946 Mannerheim resigned as president of Finland, and the parliament of Finland elected prime minister Paasikivi to succeed him, with 159 votes.
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 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.
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 and in 2010 the federal government removed the rights of prisoners serving for three years or more to vote.
Suffrage is typically only for citizens of the country, though further limits may be imposed.
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.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, 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.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 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.
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 several different candidates.Many countries in the world see an 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.
In an indirect democracy, voting is the method by which the person elected represents the people, whilst making decisions. Direct democracy is the complete opposite, where the people make the policy decisions directly without selecting a representative to do it for them.
A majority vote is when more than half of voters vote for the same person or party. However, whilst it is usually said each individual's vote does count, many countries use a combination of factors to decide who has power, not the at-large "popular vote". Most influential of these factors are districts that divide the electorate. For example, in the UK a party winning plurality in a majority of constituencies wins majority government, but they may not always have the most individual votes.
Electoral systems are the detailed constitutional arrangements and voting systems that convert the vote into a political decision.
The first step is for voters to cast the ballots, which may be simple single-choice ballots, but other types, such as multiple choice or ranked ballots may also be used. Then the votes are tallied, for which various vote counting systems may be used. and the voting system then determines the result on the basis of the tally. Most systems can be categorized as either proportional, majoritarian or mixed. Among the proportional systems, the most commonly used are party-list proportional representation systems, among majoritarian are first-past-the-post electoral system and different methods of majority voting. Mixed systems combine elements of both proportional and majoritarian methods, with some typically producing results closer to the former or the other.
Many countries have growing electoral reform movements, which advocate systems such as approval voting, single transferable vote, instant runoff voting or a Condorcet method; these methods are also gaining popularity for lesser elections in some countries where more important elections still use more traditional counting methods.
While openness and accountability are usually considered cornerstones of a democratic system, the act of casting a vote and the content of a voter's ballot are usually an important exception. The secret ballot is a relatively modern development, but it is now considered crucial in most free and fair elections, as it limits the effectiveness of intimidation.