Voting is how people get a say in what happens in their city, state or country. In very small voting groups, members may not need a formal vote, because the “sense of the meeting” emerges from discussion. Large electorates need formal, standard voting practices. In large elections, those practices help make the outcome valid (it expresses the will of the electorate), reliable (each vote is accurately recorded and counted) and legitimate (the result is acceptable). Here is how a vote is shaped, from who may cast it to how it is counted and checked.

Every country that holds elections sets its own rules about who is allowed to vote. Today, most countries allow nearly all adult citizens to vote. In some countries, notably Australia and Belgium, citizens are legally required to vote, and nonvoters can face fines, as of November 2026. In the United States, as of February 2026, a citizen who is 18 or older can vote. As of February 2026, in almost every state people register to vote first; North Dakota does not require it. Also as of February 2026, non-citizens, including permanent legal residents, cannot vote in federal or state elections, or in most local elections.

As of February 2026, in federal elections in the United States a person cannot vote online. In most elections they vote in person at a polling place or with an absentee ballot. As of November 2026, many states let people vote in person before Election Day, and some people vote by mail or by dropping off a ballot before Election Day. As of November 2026, one common way to vote is optical scan, where a voter marks a paper ballot with pen or pencil and a machine tallies it. Another is touch-screen voting, where voters pick on a computer screen.

The Census Bureau reported in April 2025 that in the 2024 presidential election, 73.6% (174 million people) of the citizen voting-age population was registered to vote, and 65.3% (154 million) voted. It found that 39.6% of people voted in person on Election Day, 30.7% voted in person before Election Day, and 29.0% voted by mail. Census turnout figures come from a survey of the civilian noninstitutionalized population, and may differ from administrative data or exit polls because of survey nonresponse, vote misreporting and question wording. These figures are as of November 2026.

In the voting process the voter's choice stays secret, and machines or election workers count the votes for each candidate. Victoria and South Australia were the first Australian states to introduce a secret ballot, in 1856, which is why it is called the Australian ballot. Once many people could vote, open voting was no longer tolerable because it could involve undue influence, from hidden persuasion and bribery to intimidation, coercion, and punishment. Secret voting greatly lowers the chance of undue influence. The secrecy of the vote was a first and necessary administrative step toward the one person, one vote principle.

Many votes are decided by a simple majority. The winner of an election is decided by rules that the voters and leaders have agreed on before the election. Countries count votes under different rules. In plurality voting the winner has the greatest number of votes; in absolute majority voting the winner needs more than half; in extraordinary majority voting a higher share, such as two-thirds; in proportional voting parties win seats in proportion to votes. The U.S. Senate votes in several ways, such as roll-call votes where each senator says yea or nay, voice votes, and division votes. In most cases a simple majority is needed, and the vice president may break a tie. In a Senate voice vote, those in favor say yea and those against say nay, and the presiding officer announces the result by judgment; names and tallies are not recorded.

The ancient Greeks were the first people to practice democracy in a community as large as a city. Direct democracy was practiced in small communities, where all or nearly all citizens could meet in an assembly. Representative democracy began in larger communities, such as the nation-states that developed in Europe and North America in the 18th century. Athens had a democracy in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. In the Athenian assembly, citizens voted by holding up their hands, and the majority won. All adult male citizens could take part in the Assembly, but women, children, foreign residents, and enslaved people were excluded. In the mid-4th century BC, adult male citizens were only about 12 percent of the people in the city.

In the Roman assemblies, only adult male citizens took part, and people voted not one by one but as members of assigned groups, or voting blocks. Elections were used in ancient Athens, in Rome, and to choose popes and Holy Roman emperors, but the elections of today began with representative government in Europe and North America from the 17th century on. Once governments were believed to get their power from the consent of the governed and to need that consent regularly, people had to decide who counted among the governed whose consent was needed. In Britain, the Reform Act of 1832 was one of three major 19th-century Reform Bills that made the electorate larger. It came after a movement to end “rotten boroughs,” small districts controlled by one person or family.

Voting rights in the United States have expanded, contracted, and expanded again as Americans dealt with shifting issues of politics, race, class, and wealth. Whether by constitutional amendment or by federal, state, or local legislation, expanding the electorate means changing laws. Owning property of a certain size or value was the earliest qualification for voters in the new United States. From the 1820s through the 1850s, states abolished property and tax requirements for casting ballots, and white workingmen gained a permanent influence on American elections. Many states began to define eligible voters as white males over the age of twenty-one. Nearly all white men could vote in the 1856 presidential election.

In July 1848 the Seneca Falls Convention in New York launched the women's rights movement and also called for woman suffrage. Wyoming Territory gave women the right to vote in all elections in 1869. In 1890 Wyoming became a state and the first whose constitution guaranteed women the right to vote. In January 1918 the amendment passed the House with the bare minimum two-thirds support but failed narrowly in the Senate. On May 21, 1919, the House passed the 19th Amendment, and two weeks later the Senate followed. Tennessee was the 36th state to ratify it, on August 18, 1920, which gave it the agreement of three-fourths of the states. The 19th Amendment says the right of citizens to vote cannot be denied because of sex. After 1920, many women still could not vote for decades because of discriminatory state voting laws.

African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, “Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot.” The 15th Amendment was passed by Congress on February 26, 1869, and ratified on February 3, 1870. It says the right of citizens to vote cannot be denied because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. African Americans voted and held office in many Southern states through the 1880s. In 1883 the Supreme Court struck down Reconstruction-era attempts to enforce the 15th Amendment, which ended federal efforts to protect civil rights for decades. But in the early 1890s, literacy tests, grandfather clauses and other devices to keep African Americans from voting were written into the laws of former Confederate states. In 1937 the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia poll tax in Breedlove v. Suttles, reasoning that states may decide who can vote except where the 15th and 19th Amendments apply. In 1966 the Supreme Court decided Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections and held Virginia's poll tax unconstitutional, which extended the ban on poll taxes to state elections.

Congress passed Civil Rights Acts in 1957, 1960, and 1964, but they were not strong enough to prevent voting discrimination by local officials. Events in Mississippi in 1964 and in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 gained national attention and helped persuade President Johnson and Congress to start national voting rights legislation. On March 15, 1965, Johnson urged Congress to pass legislation “which will make it impossible to thwart the 15th Amendment.” Congress passed the voting rights bill on August 5, 1965, and Johnson signed it the next day. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed literacy tests and provided for federal examiners with the power to register qualified citizens to vote in certain jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination.

Before the 26th Amendment, the voting age in most states was 21. In 1970 Congress lowered the voting age to 18 in an extension of the Voting Rights Act. Two states sued, and in Oregon v. Mitchell (1970) the Supreme Court upheld the states' claim to set their own voting-age rules. In response to the Supreme Court ruling, an amendment was introduced in Congress, spurred by student activism during the Vietnam War and by the fact that 18-year-olds could be drafted but in most states could not vote in federal elections. The 26th Amendment was passed by Congress on March 23, 1971, and ratified on July 1, 1971.

As of November 2026, the Electoral College is a process, not a place. It is the system by which the president and vice president are chosen. The Electoral College has 538 electors, and a majority of 270 electoral votes is needed to elect the President. On Election Day, people vote for a presidential and vice presidential candidate and a slate of electors who represent those candidates. The names of the electors do not appear on the ballot. Electors meet in their states on the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December after the general election, and cast their votes for President and Vice President on separate ballots. Each state's electoral votes are counted in a joint session of Congress on January 6 of the year after the electors meet, and the Vice President, as President of the Senate, presides and announces the results.

In 1787 at least four ways to choose the President were proposed: by Congress, by state governors, by state legislatures, or by a direct vote of the voters. The Electoral College was made at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 as a compromise between a vote in Congress and a popular vote. Article II of the Constitution let states pick electors in any manner they chose, in a number equal to their representation in Congress. Under the original plan, electors voted for two people, and the person with the most votes, if a majority, became president and the next vice president. If no one had a majority, the House of Representatives chose among the top five. A tie in 1800 between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr led to the 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, which required separate votes for President and Vice President.

As of November 2026, a post-election audit checks that the equipment and procedures used to count votes worked properly, using a hand count of paper records. In a post-election audit only a sample of the paper records is typically checked, so it is in effect a partial recount that checks whether the voting system recorded and counted votes accurately. Post-election audits are done whatever the margin of victory, unlike recounts, which are most often triggered when the margin is tight. An audit can lead to a full recount if errors are found. The most common type of post-election audit is a traditional tabulation audit. There are also risk-limiting audits, procedural audits, and others.

Words to know

• legitimate: acceptable
• plurality: most votes
• electors: candidates' representatives
• audit: check of records
• suffrage: right to vote