Where do our voting words come from?
To canvass for votes is to sift them in a cloth sheet. To scrutinise a ballot is to pick through the rags. And a quorum is, quite literally, the Latin for 'of whom.'
The words for the act of voting are stranger than the words for the people we vote for. We have looked before at the vocabulary of the campaign, the candidates in their white togas and the ballots that began as little balls. But the machinery of voting itself, the right, the sifting, the counting, hides some of the oddest pictures in the language. Underneath the polling booth sit a broken shard, a cloth sheet, and a heap of rags.
The right to vote
Two of our grandest words for the vote are, at the root, about freedom and about breakage. Suffrage, the right to vote, comes from the Latin suffragium, “a vote, support.” Its deeper origin is genuinely uncertain, but one tantalising guess ties it to frangere, “to break,” from the old habit of casting a vote with a broken shard of pottery dropped into a jar. A suffrage may, long ago, have been a broken piece.
Franchise is plainer and more hopeful. It comes from the Old French franc, “free,” the same word as the Franks who once ruled and, as the ruling people, counted as the free ones. To enfranchise someone is, literally, to set them free, and to disenfranchise them is to take that freedom back.
The machinery
Now the strange ones. To canvass for votes has nothing to do with tents. It comes from canvas, the coarse cloth, and it began as a rough game: to canvass someone was to toss them in a canvas sheet, a punishment and a kind of sifting. From tossing came shaking, from shaking came sifting and examining, and from examining came the sense we use: to sift a neighbourhood for support, one door at a time.
To scrutinise a ballot is, at the root, to go through the rubbish. Scrutiny comes from the Latin scrutari, “to search,” which first meant to search a thing right down to the rags, from scruta, “trash, old clothes.” A scrutineer, the official who examines the votes, is by ancestry a rag-and-bone picker, sorting the good from the junk. It is the same reason a face you cannot read is inscrutable: there is no rummaging through it.
And a quorum, the number of members you need present for a vote to count, is simply the Latin word quorum, “of whom.” It was lifted straight out of an old legal formula that named the people “of whom” a certain number had to be present. We took a stray scrap of Latin grammar and made it a rule of the room.
Handing it back to the people
When a question goes to the whole electorate, the words turn to giving and carrying. A referendum is a thing “to be carried back,” from the Latin referre, “to carry back”: a question handed back to the people to settle. A plebiscite is the same idea in older dress, from plebs, “the common people,” and scitum, “a decree”: a ruling made by the plebs themselves.
What the winner claims afterwards is a mandate, from the Latin mandare, “to entrust,” built from manus, “hand,” and dare, “to give”: a mandate is something placed into your hand. And against it stands the bluntest word of the lot, the veto, which is not a noun the Romans dressed up but a whole sentence folded into one word: veto, “I forbid.”
So the vocabulary of voting is a workshop of old objects and gestures: a broken shard, a canvas sheet, a heap of rags, a scrap of borrowed Latin, a thing pressed into the hand, and a single flat “I forbid.” We picture an election as numbers and abstractions, but the words remember it as something you do with your hands, and once you have seen the shard, the sheet, and the rags, you will not unsee them.
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