Ballot box

A ballot box is a temporarily sealed container, usually a square box though sometimes a tamper resistant bag, with a narrow slot in the top sufficient to accept a ballot paper in an election but which prevents anyone from accessing the votes cast until the close of the voting period. A ballot drop box allows voters who have received a ballot by mail to submit it for counting in a self-service fashion. In the United States, ballot boxes are usually sealed after the end of polling, and transported to vote-counting centers.

History

In the Roman Republic, each voter initially gave his vote orally to an official who made a note of it on an official tablet, but later in the Republic, the secret ballot was introduced, and the voter recorded his vote with a stylus on a wax-covered boxwood tablet, then dropped the completed ballot in the sitella or urna (voting urn), sometimes also called cista. Paper ballots were used in Rome to some extent as early as 139 BCE.

In ancient India in the 10th century Cholla era, in Tamil Nadu, palm leaves and pots were used to elect representatives to village administrations through the Kudavolai system. The candidates' names were written on palm leaves, and these were placed inside a pot. Winners were chosen through the drawing of random ballots. While this system may have been used before the 10th century, there is no direct historical evidence as of 2024.

In ancient Greece, voting was done by dropping small balls or tokens into ballot boxes to select preferred candidates. This method was also used in modern historical secret societies, which used white balls to vote someone into the organization, and black balls to keep them out, the origin of the word "blackball".