The Longest Line in History

Part 1 of Election Day — a short series for the week of the vote: where elections came from, the neighbors who run ours, and the results as they come in.

An Athenian ballot from 487 BC — an ostrakon naming Megacles, cast in a vote to exile him. Photo: Giovanni Dall'Orto, Ancient Agora Museum, Athens, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY).

When you stand in line to vote on Tuesday, you'll be standing in the longest line in history. Not the longest at your precinct — the longest there is. People have been lining up to choose their leaders for about twenty-six centuries.

The first elections we know of weren't much like ours. In Sparta, by tradition around 650 BC, the people elected their elders by shouting. Candidates were presented one at a time, judges shut away in a nearby building ranked the roar of the crowd, and the man with the loudest shout won. Aristotle thought it was childish. But it was a vote — the people decided, and everybody heard them decide.

Athens did it more carefully. After the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BC, the Athenian assembly voted on the laws and elected its generals by a show of hands. Here's the part that surprises people: for most other offices, Athens didn't use elections at all. They used a lottery. Ordinary citizens' names were drawn by chance — because the Athenians figured elections favored the rich and famous, and any citizen ought to be able to serve. Elections for the jobs that took skill, pure chance for the rest. We kept the half they were suspicious of.

Rome elected its magistrates in public assemblies from the founding of the Republic in 509 BC — but for nearly four hundred years you voted out loud, in front of your neighbors, your creditors, and anyone who'd paid for your vote. The secret ballot didn't arrive until about 139 BC. Think about that the next time somebody complains about the little cardboard dividers at the precinct: privacy at the ballot box was a hard-won invention, and a late one.

There are older stories — councils in Mesopotamia arguing over war and policy a thousand years before Athens, retold in the age of Gilgamesh. But those were advisors around a king, as far as we can tell. The choosing, by count of the people themselves, starts with the Greeks.

And the most modern-feeling record of all comes from a village in India. Stone inscriptions at Uttaramerur, carved around 920 AD, lay out the rules for local elections in fine detail: who was old enough to run, whose names went into the pot to be drawn — and who was disqualified. Committee members who hadn't submitted their accounts were out. So were their close relatives. Eleven hundred years ago, a farming village in Tamil country was already wrestling with eligibility, term rules, and keeping the books honest.

So the ballot you'll hold on Tuesday has ancestors: a shout in Sparta, a raised hand in Athens, a name drawn from a pot in India. The tools changed. The idea didn't: the people get a say, out loud, together, on the record.

Next in this series, I'll introduce you to the people who'll actually hand you that ballot — because Election Day runs on more neighbors than you'd guess.