vote

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noun

The right or chance to express an opinion or participate in a decision: say, suffrage, voice. Informal say-so. See participate/abstain.

verb

To select by vote for an office. ballot, elect. See choice, politics.

Definition: decide on representation
Antonyms: abstain

There are three main subdivisions of the study of voting in political science: voting procedures, voting behaviour in mass electorates, and voting in smaller bodies such as legislatures.

In ancient Greece, voting was not much used for elections to offices, which were filled on the jury principle of random selection. But it was used for decisions on propositions put before the democratic assembly, and on the fate of individuals. Periodically, assemblies voted on whether to ‘ostracize’—that is, temporarily banish—somebody. The words ostracize and ostracism are derived from the Greek for ‘tile’ because bits of broken pottery were used as voting slips. Multiple voting slips with the same name in the same handwriting have been found, suggesting the earliest organized write-in (or rather write-out) vote.

There is a pioneering discussion of voting procedures in the Roman Senate in a letter of Pliny the Younger, ad 105, but the elaboration of voting procedures was next advanced in Europe by the medieval religious orders. As they had to choose their own officials independently of the papal authorities in Rome, they drew up elaborate procedures for doing so. At the same time, Italian city-states drew up elaborate voting procedures. The best-known of these were the rules for electing doges in Venice.

Voting re-emerged as a central theme in democratic theory in the eighteenth century with Rousseau and Condorcet. Democratic constitutions containing voting rules were written between 1787 and 1793 for the United States, France, and Poland. For the evolution of voting rules since then, see also social choice; proportional representation; plurality.

The study of voting behaviour as opposed to voting procedures began in the twentieth century. The first studies were based on aggregate data such as election results. Electoral geographers in the Siegfried tradition were able to establish the links between certain geographical features and patterns of voting behaviour. Herbert Tingsten in Sweden produced one of the first studies of the factors associated with turnout, again based on aggregate data.

However, aggregate data must always be used cautiously (see ecological association). Data about individuals required the development of the techniques of survey research from the late 1930s onwards. Since then, vast quantities of evidence have accumulated on the relationships between such things as class, education, religion, and social attitudes (‘independent’ or ‘predictor’ variables), on the one hand, and voting behaviour (as ‘dependent variable’), on the other. (See also Michigan school; post-materialism.) Where, say, class and education both have an effect on voting, but are of course also related to each other because people in higher classes have or acquire more education, how do we disentangle the effects of each of the two on voting? Powerful computers enable more sophisticated statistical techniques based on multiple regression to attack these problems.

The study of voting in legislatures such as the House of Commons and the US Congress (often called ‘roll-call voting’) also dates back to early in the twentieth century. Initially, aggregate methods were used, notably by A. L. Lowell in his The Government of England (revised 1919). In the United States, where party discipline is weak, methods of analysing the divisions among Democrats or among Republicans by such predictors as their ideology, the length of time they had served in Congress, or the interests of their districts, are very well established. In the United Kingdom, the power of the party whips means that House of Commons division lists are usually quite uninformative. However, a few studies of roll-call voting have used more indirect measures such as floor revolts, membership of party factions, or Early Day Motions.

The defining act of American democracy, voting is as complicated as its history. Colonial American governments imported property tests for Suffrage from England, but the requirement that one own land or personal property worth forty or fifty pounds or land that would rent for forty or more shillings a year was much less restrictive in sparsely populated America than in Britain. Almost any white male who lived in the colonies long enough could accumulate that much property, and historians estimate that between 50 and 97 percent of the white male colonists could vote. Apparently, even these property tests were rarely enforced, especially in close elections. By 1800, property qualifications had been weakened or a taxpaying qualification substituted in all but three states. Noisy battles over universal white male suffrage in New York in 1821 and Rhode Island in the 1830s and 1840s were not typical struggles, but last, doomed efforts by opponents of white male equality. In 1860, only four states retained taxpaying or other minor requirements, while the rest had adopted virtually universal white native male suffrage. In addition, several states allowed free African American men to vote, and from 1777 to 1807, New Jersey enfranchised propertied women.

Then as now, not all those who were eligible voted. Although few early election returns survive, from 1730 on turnouts in various colonies ranged from 10 to 45 percent of the free adult males, with close contests stimulating more campaigning and voting than races dominated by one candidate or party. Turnout slumped during the turmoil of the Revolution, when pro-English Tories were often disfranchised; rebounded during the 1780s and 1790s, especially in states where Federalists and Antifederalists or Jeffersonian Republicans were both well organized; and fell off again as the Federalist Party collapsed after 1812. Presidential election turnout rose to 55 percent of those eligible to vote with the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, reached 78 percent in the election of 1840, and continued above 60 percent until 1912, peaking at 83 percent in 1876.

Votes do not always count equally. At first, state legislators, not voters, usually chose members of the Electoral College, who then chose the president. Elite control soon eroded, and by 1828 political parties ensured that the winner of a plurality of the vote in a state would get all or nearly all of the state's electoral votes. Ironically, democracy reduced the value of the votes for losing presidential candidates in a state to nothing. Likewise, before 1842, some states elected members of Congress on the "general ticket" system, instead of by districts, allowing voters from one party to elect every congressman in a state. Other states drew noncontiguous districts or tidier districts with wide population disparities. Not until 1872 were congressional districts required to be contiguous and nearly equal in population; these mandates were never strictly enforced and were completely abandoned after 1911. Before the Civil War, under the Constitution slaves counted for three-fifths as much as free people in congressional and electoral college apportionment, enhancing the power of the slaveholding South. Since 1788, every state, no matter how large or small, has been entitled to two members in the U.S. Senate, giving a resident of Wyoming in 2000, for instance, 69 times as much representation in the Senate as a resident of California.

After the Civil War, more African Americans sought the vote, and abolitionist Republicans granted it. Congress first secured voting rights to blacks in the federally controlled District of Columbia, then, in 1867, in ten states of the former Confederacy, and finally, through the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, in the nation as a whole. Since black suffrage had lost in twelve of fifteen referenda in northern states from 1846 through 1869, the Republicans' actions might have seemed foolhardy. But the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment robbed northern Democrats of an issue—the imaginary horrors of black suffrage, and it gave southern blacks a weapon with which to defend themselves—by voting Republican. As a further shield, Congress in 1870–1871 passed enforcement and supervisory acts to guard black voters against violence, intimidation, and corrupt or unequal balloting practices. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court emasculated these laws in 1876 in United States v. Reese and United States
V. Cruikshank.

The "white terror" that ended Reconstruction in the South in the mid-1870s did not immediately terminate African American voting. A majority of black males continued to vote in the South in the 1880s and in some states until 1900. African Americans were elected to Congress until 1901 and to southern state legislatures until 1907. It was legal, not extra-legal methods, that first constrained black political power, and then largely eliminated it. Gerrymandering, the substitution of at-large for district elections, and the establishment of partisan election boards facilitated fraud and elected racist Democratic state legislators. The new legislators then passed registration, Poll Tax, and secret ballot laws, which diminished voting by the poor and illiterate, white as well as black, Republicans, and Populists. These restrictions on the electorate, as well as continued ballot-box stuffing, allowed Democrats after 1890 to pass literacy and property tests for suffrage in constitutional conventions or referenda. Biased administration of these and other regulations of voting, such as the all-white Democratic primary, disfranchised nearly all southern blacks and many poor whites until the 1940s and 1950s.

Because women were less predictably Republican than were former slaves, who owed their legal status to the party of Lincoln, and because adding another radical reform might have nullified the opportunity for any change whatsoever, Republicans rejected the bid by the fledgling women's rights movement to add a ban on gender discrimination to that on race in the Fifteenth Amendment. It took women fifty years, innumerable local and state campaigns, and ideological shifts by the suffragists away from racial and antiliquor crusades before they secured the vote nationally with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Continued discrimination against women by male political leaders, as well as such barriers as the poll tax in the South, which disproportionately diminished women's votes, curtailed electoral opportunities for women until a third wave of feminism in the 1970s. By the 1990s, women turned out to vote at higher rates than men, and female elected officials had become commonplace.

While the fact is seldom emphasized, European (though not Asian) immigrants to America obtained the right to vote with some controversy, but little real difficulty, despite the fact that many from the mid-nineteenth century on differed in language and religion from the dominant English-speaking Protestants. Politics in nineteenth-century America was a white male melting pot—a limited achievement, to be sure, but one that other countries' histories might make us appreciate.

Although the New Deal revived voter enthusiasm, along with active government, political power remained unequally distributed. One response was the Supreme Court's decisions in such malapportionment cases as Baker v. Carr (1962) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964), which ended the practice of having one election district with up to 422 times as many people as another in the same state. In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which reenfranchised blacks in the Deep South and gave courts and the U.S. Department of Justice the tools necessary to ensure that electoral rules were not biased against ethnic minorities. A third reform, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, sought to increase levels of participation, especially among the young and the poor, by allowing people to register to vote by mail and in government offices, including departments of motor vehicles, and regulating purges of voter rolls. Still, in the 2000 presidential election, only 55 percent of adult American citizens voted, one of the lowest percentages in a national election of any developed country. As the aftermath of that election reminded us, with its tales of incorrect registration records, confusing ballots, defective voting machines, inconsistent vote counts, biased officials, unprecedented judicial intervention, and defeat of the winner of the popular vote, voting involves much more than simply showing up at the polls.

Bibliography

Keyssar, Alexander. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2000.

Kornbluh, Mark Lawrence. Why America Stopped Voting: The Decline of Participatory Democracy and the Emergence of Modern American Politics. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Kousser, J. Morgan. Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

The right to vote is a fundamental element of the United States' system of representative democracy. In this form of government, policy decisions are made by representatives chosen in periodic elections based on the principle of universal suffrage, which requires that all citizens (or at least all competent adults not guilty of serious crimes) be eligible to vote in elections. Democratic governments are premised on political equality. Although individuals are inherently unequal with respect to their talents and virtues, they are deemed equal in their essential worth and dignity as human beings. Each individual has an equal right to participate in politics under the law.

Though these principles of representative democracy and universal suffrage have been idealized throughout U.S. history, citizens often have needed to struggle to make these principles a reality. The Framers of the U.S. Constitution did not explicitly define qualifications for voting but delegated to the states the right to set voting requirements. At the time the Constitution was ratified, property qualifications for voting still existed, and the franchise was granted originally only to white men.

The Growth of Enfranchisement

The movement toward universal suffrage can be traced to the advent of Jacksonian democracy in the 1830s. Property qualifications rapidly diminished for white voters by the beginning of the Civil War. The end of slavery led in 1870 to the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, which theoretically granted the right to vote to African Americans. It was not until the 1960s that this right became a reality.

The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, removed gender as a qualification for voting. The Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, provided for the direct election of U.S. senators. They had previously been elected by state legislatures. The Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified in 1964, abolished poll taxes as prerequisites for voting in federal elections. Finally, the Twenty-sixth Amendment, ratified in 1971, lowered the voting age to eighteen. These constitutional amendments reveal the slow movement toward universal suffrage, but it would take court decisions as well as federal legislation to ensure that citizens were not denied their constitutional right to vote.

Attempts at Disenfranchisement

For a hundred years the legislatures of southern and border states used a succession of different types of legislation to disenfranchise African Americans and the members of other minority groups. These laws were challenged in court, leading to a steady stream of decisions that restricted the ability of legislatures to limit voting rights. Beginning in the 1960s, the federal government became actively involved in ending discriminatory voting practices. Federal legislation triggered a new set of issues involving minority representation. In addition, the federal government set new procedures for voter registration, which made it easier to register and vote.

Despite the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, African Americans had difficulty exercising their right to vote. In some states, public officials ignored the Fifteenth Amendment, and in other areas, groups such as the Ku Klux Klan used terrorism to prevent African Americans from voting. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down congressional attempts to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment in United States v. Reese, 92 U.S. (2 Otto) 214, 23 L. Ed. 563 (1875). The Court reversed itself in Ex Parte Yarbrough, 110 U.S. 651, 4 S. Ct. 152, 28 L. Ed. 274 (1884), yet in the 1880s Congress showed little interest in securing African American voting rights.

Southern and border states realized, however, that the federal government had the power to ensure the enfranchisement of African Americans. Therefore, these states sought ways of excluding African Americans from the political process; these methods appeared neutral but were employed solely against persons of color.

Grandfather Clause

The most blatant official means of preventing African Americans from voting was the grandfather clause. First enacted by Mississippi in 1890, this method soon spread throughout the southern and border states. Typically these clauses required literacy tests for all voters whose ancestors had not been entitled to vote prior to 1866. This meant that African Americans were subject to literacy tests arbitrarily administered by white officials, whereas illiterate whites were exempted from this requirement because their ancestors could vote in 1866. In 1915 the Supreme Court struck down Oklahoma's grandfather clause in Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347, 35 S. Ct. 926, 59 L. Ed. 1340.

White Primary

After the grandfather clause was ruled unconstitutional, southern states adopted the white primary as a way of excluding African Americans from voting in a meaningful way. The Democratic party in many states adopted a rule excluding African Americans from party membership. The state legislatures worked in concert with the party, closing the party primaries to everyone except party members. Because nomination by the Democratic party was tantamount to election in these essentially one-party states, African Americans were effectively disenfranchised. The Supreme Court, in Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649, 64 S. Ct. 757, 88 L. Ed. 987 (1944), struck down the white primary as a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment's prohibition against voting discrimination based on race.

Literacy Tests

The end of grandfather clauses and white primaries led to the use of other exclusionary tactics. Many states relied on literacy tests that, despite superficial neutrality, were administered in a racially discriminatory manner. White people rarely had to take the test, even if their literacy was questionable. However, because the Constitution had left the determination of voting qualifications to the states and the literacy tests were on their face racially neutral, the Supreme Court refused to strike them down. Ultimately, Congress abolished literacy tests through the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C.A. § 1973 et seq.).

Poll Tax

Another less common means of preventing African Americans from voting was the poll tax. At the time the Constitution was adopted, poll taxes were used as a legitimate means of raising revenue. By the 1850s poll taxes had disappeared, but they were revived in the early twentieth century by states seeking to exclude African Americans from the political process. The tax generally amounted to $2 per election, an amount large enough to deter most persons of color, as well as poor whites, from voting. On its face, the poll tax was racially neutral. The Supreme Court initially upheld the tax in Breedlove v. Suttles, 302 U.S. 277, 58 S. Ct. 205, 82 L. Ed. 252 (1937), but over time it became clear that it was being used in a racially discriminatory manner. The Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified in 1963, abolished the use of the poll tax in federal elections. In 1966 the Supreme Court, in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663, 86 S. Ct. 1079, 16 L. Ed. 2d 169, struck down the use of poll taxes in state and local elections, ruling that such taxes violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.

Voting Reforms

Voting Rights Act of 1965

The passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a watershed event in U.S. history. For the first time the federal government undertook voting reforms that had traditionally been left to the states. The act prohibits the states and their political subdivisions from imposing voting qualifications or prerequisites to voting, or standards, practices, or procedures that deny or curtail the right of a U.S. citizen to vote because of race, color, or membership in a language minority group. The act was extended in 1970 and again in 1982, when its provisions were renewed for an additional twenty-five years.

Southern states challenged the legislation as a dangerous attack on states' rights, but the Supreme Court, in South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 86 S. Ct. 803, 15 L. Ed. 2d 769 (1966), upheld the constitutionality of the act, despite the fact that the law was, in the words of Chief Justice Earl Warren, "inventive."

The initial act covered the seven states in the South that had used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other devices to obstruct registration by African Americans. Under the law, a federal court can appoint federal examiners, who are authorized to place qualified persons on the list of eligible voters. The act waived accumulated poll taxes and abolished literacy tests and similar devices in those areas to which the statute applied.

In addition, the act required the seven states to obtain "preclearance" from the Department of Justice or the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia before making changes in the electoral system. The 1982 extension of the act revised this provision, extending it to all states. This means that a voter may challenge a voting practice or procedure on the ground that it is racially discriminatory either by intent or by effect.

Motor Voter Laws

A state has the right to require bona fide residency as a prerequisite to the exercise of the right to vote in its elections. The courts have also upheld durational residency requirements (how long a person must have resided in the state) for voting. Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, many states began to abandon durational requirements, making it possible for a new resident to register to vote when he applies for a state driver's license. This "motor voter" statute was first enacted in Minnesota (Minn. Stat. Ann. § 201.161 [1992]), and by 1992 twenty-seven states had some form of motor voter law. Congress eliminated durational residency requirements for voting with the passage of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (42 U.S.C.A. § 1973gg et seq.). The act allows anyone over the age of eighteen to register to vote while obtaining a driver's license.

Apportionment

Guaranteeing an individual the right to vote does not necessarily mean that the voters in a particular district have the same voting strength as voters in another district. Since the 1960s, however, the implementation of the concept of one person, one vote has meant that unreasonable disparities in voting strength have been eliminated. Never- theless, racially discriminatory dilutions of voting strength have led the federal courts to become intimately involved in the drawing of election districts.

One Person, One Vote

The Supreme Court, in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 84 S. Ct. 1362, 12 L. Ed. 2d 506 (1964), established the principle of "one person, one vote" based on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision resulted in almost every state's redrawing its legislative districts and in the shifting of power from rural to urban areas. All subsequent constitutional law on apportionment has relied on the principles established in Reynolds.

Until the Reynolds decision, most state legislatures gave more seats to sparsely populated rural areas than to heavily populated urban areas. Because rural legislators controlled the legislature and had a vested interest in perpetuating this apportionment scheme, legislative change had proved impossible. In Reynolds the Supreme Court concluded that to permit the minority to have power over the majority would be a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. The dilution of the weight of a person's vote because of where that person lives qualified as invidious discrimination, just as if the decision had been based on that person's race or financial status. Therefore, the Court required that "each citizen have an equally effective voice in the election of members of his state legislature."

Racially Discriminatory Apportionment

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave the courts the right to review racially discriminatory election districts. The federal courts have struck down at-large elections, in which a number of officials are chosen to represent the district, as opposed to an arrangement under which each of the officials represents one smaller district or ward. Southern cities where whites were in the majority used the at-large election system to perpetuate all-white rule. Courts have required the creation of smaller wards or districts that give African Americans and other protected groups a reasonable opportunity to elect a person of color to city council.

Racial Gerrymandering

The courts have also tackled the issue of racial gerrymandering, which is the intentional manipulation of legislative districts for political purposes. In these cases districts have been drawn in bizarre shapes to include or exclude voters of a particular race.

In the first cases white politicians gerrymandered districts to prevent African Americans from having enough voting strength to elect a person of color. In the 1990s the debate moved to the legitimacy of creating, under the authority of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, unusually shaped congressional districts that contained a majority of minority voters to elect a person of color. The Supreme Court, in Shaw v. Hunt, ___U.S.___, 116 S. Ct. 1894, 135 L. Ed. 2d 207 (1996), ruled that the redrawing of a North Carolina congressional district into a "bizarre-looking" shape so as to include a majority of African Americans could not be justified by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, because it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor found it "unsettling how closely the North Carolina plan resembles the most egregious racial gerrymandering of the past." O'Connor agreed that prior cases had never made race-conscious redistricting "impermissible in all circumstances," yet agreed with the white plaintiffs that the redistricting was "so extremely irregular on its face that it rationally can be viewed only as an effort to segregate races for purposes of voting, without regard for traditional districting principles and without sufficiently compelling justification."

Voting Procedures

The passage of the federal motor voter law eliminated restrictive voter registration requirements. A person may now register when applying for a state driver's license. In addition, a person may register at the polling place in her voting district by showing a state driver's license and having two witnesses vouch for her. Persons who will not be able to vote at a polling place on election day may apply for an absentee ballot and vote ahead of time. These ballots are not opened until after the polls close on election day.

Since 1884 the United States has used the secret ballot. Originally paper ballots were used, but in many areas of the United States mechanical voting machines are employed. Voting systems are also in place in which a machine optically scans a paper ballot and tabulates the votes for each office. Enhanced technology has allowed quicker reporting of results and fewer arithmetical errors. Nevertheless, candidates may ask for a recount of the ballots, and in circumstances where the vote is very close or where fraud is alleged, each ballot is examined for accuracy and compliance with the law.

Generally the results of each election race are reported to a local board, which certifies the result to the state's secretary of state. The secretary, in turn, reviews the results and issues an official certificate of election to the successful candidate.

See: Civil Rights; Democratic Party; Equal Protection; Gerrymander; Independent Parties; Republican Party; Reynolds v. Sims; Women's Rights.

n.

The instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

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Quotes:

"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost." - John Quincy Adams

"Where annual elections end where slavery begins." - John Quincy Adams

"Suffrage is the pivotal right." - Susan B. Anthony

"Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing." - Bernard M. Baruch

"The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge." - John Jay Chapman

"The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson color of it should creep into his vote. The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes." - Gilbert K. Chesterton

See more famous quotes about Voting

• Acts, Powers, Conditions, and Procedures - vote: exercise of political franchise in election of officials or expression of views on issues
• Elections and Campaigns - vote: formal expression of opinion at ballot box
• Judgments Pro and Con - vote: give formal expression of one’s opinion or choice
• Judgments and Critiques - vote: (vb) state one’s opinion, esp. express formal opinion in political process

Dansk (Danish)
n. - stemme, afstemning, stemmeret, stemmetal, bevilling
v. intr. - stemme
v. tr. - stemme, bevilge, erklære for

idioms:

• I vote    jeg stemmer
• one man one vote    én mand, én stemme
• one person one vote    én person, én stemme
• put to a vote    bringe til afstemning
• put to the vote    bringe til afstemning
• vote down    nedstemme
• vote in    indvælge
• vote of censure    censurering
• vote of confidence    tillidserklæring
• vote of no confidence    mistillidserklæring
• vote of thanks    formel taksigelse
• vote out    nedstemme
• vote with one's feet    stemme via handling
• voting by call    telefonafstemning
• voting stock    stemmegrundlag

Nederlands (Dutch)
stemmen, kiezen, aannemen, een opinie uiten, verklaren, voorstellen, doen stemmen voor iets, kiezen in overeenstemming met, kiesrecht, stemming, stem, balletje gebruikt in geheime stemming, oordeel bereikt door stemming, kiezer, kiesgroep, voorstel om over te stemmen gelijke stemrecht voor iedereen

Français (French)
n. - vote, droit de vote, voix (npl)
v. intr. - voter
v. tr. - voter, élire, accorder (qch à qn), proposer

idioms:

• I vote    Je propose (que)
• one man one vote    droit de vote, suffrage universel
• one person one vote    suffrage universel
• put to a vote    mettre (qch) aux voix
• put to the vote    mettre (qch) aux voix
• vote down    battre (qn) aux voix, rejeter (motion)
• vote in    élire
• vote of censure    motion de censure
• vote of confidence    (Pol, fig) vote de confiance
• vote of no confidence    motion de censure
• vote of thanks    discours de remerciements
• vote out    rejeter, ne pas élire
• vote with one's feet    quitter le navire, montrer sa désapprobation par des actes
• voting by call    voter par appel nominal
• voting stock    (Fin) action avec droit de vote

Deutsch (German)
n. - Stimme, Abstimmungsergebnis, Wahl, Abstimmung
v. - wählen, abstimmen, bewilligen, (ugs.) vorschlagen

idioms:

• I vote    ich schlage vor, daß
• one person one vote    jede Person eine Stimme
• put to the vote    zur Abstimmung bringen
• vote down    niederstimmen
• vote in    wählen
• vote of censure    Mißtrauensantrag
• vote of confidence    Vertrauensantrag
• vote of no confidence    Mißtrauensantrag
• vote of thanks    Dankadresse
• vote out    abwählen
• vote with one's feet    mit den Füßen abstimmen
• voting by call    namentliche Abstimmung
• voting stock    stimmberechtigte Aktien

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - ψήφος, ψηφοφορία, δικαίωμα ψήφου, αποτέλεσμα ψηφοφορίας, (Βρετ.) κονδύλιο ειδικού προορισμού
v. - ψηφίζω, δίνω ψήφο, εγκρίνω, αναγνωρίζω ομοφώνως, (μτφ.) προτείνω, εισηγούμαι

idioms:

• I vote    προτείνω
• one man one vote    καθολική ψήφος
• one person one vote    καθολική ψήφος
• put to a vote    θέτω σε ψηφοφορία
• put to the vote    θέτω σε ψηφοφορία
• vote down    καταψηφίζω
• vote in    υπερψηφίζω (εισδοχή)
• vote of censure    (ψηφοφορία για) πρόταση μομφής
• vote of confidence    ψήφος εμπιστοσύνης
• vote of no confidence    (ψήφος για) πρόταση δυσπιστίας
• vote of thanks    έκφραση ευχαριστιών του συνόλου, ευχαριστήριο ψήφισμα
• vote out    υπερψηφίζω (αποβολή)
• vote with one's feet    δείχνω τη δυσαρέσκειά μου με αποχώρηση
• voting by call    ψηφοφορία δια βοής
• voting stock    μετοχές με δικαίωμα ψήφου στις γενικές συνελεύσεις

Italiano (Italian)
votare, voto

idioms:

• "I vote"    "Io voto"
• one man/person one vote    suffragio universale
• put to a/the vote    mettere al voto
• vote down    respingere
• vote in    eleggere
• vote of (no) confidence    mozione di fiducia
• vote of censure    mozione di sfiducia
• vote of confidence    mozione di fiducia
• vote of no confidence    mozione di sfiducia
• vote of thanks    mozione di ringraziamento
• vote out    destituire
• vote with one's feet    astenersi, votare con la propria presenza
• voting stock    azioni votanti

Português (Portuguese)
n. - voto (m), cédula eleitoral (f), direito de voto (m)
v. - votar, aprovar ou decidir por voto, sugerir (coloq.)

idioms:

• "I vote"    sugerir que algo deverá ocorrer
• one man/person one vote    um homem, um voto
• put to a/the vote    votar
• vote down    rejeitar, derrotar ou suprimir por votos
• vote in    eleger ou escolher por votação
• vote of (no) confidence    voto (m) de confiança (desconfiança) (Brit.) (Pol.)
• vote of censure    voto (m) de censura (Pol.)
• vote of confidence    voto de confiança
• vote of thanks    voto (m) de agradecimento
• vote out    destituir por votação
• vote with one's feet    retirar-se de uma organização para outra
• voting stock    base (f) eleitoral (Pol.)

Русский (Russian)
голосовать, постановлять большинством голосов, голосование, голос, решение

idioms:

• "I vote"    выражать свое мнение
• one man/person one vote    один человек - один голос
• put to a/the vote    ставить вопрос на голосование
• vote down    отклонить
• vote in    выбрать
• vote of (no) confidence    вотум доверия (недоверия)
• vote of censure    вотум недоверия
• vote of thanks    выражение признательности
• vote out    проголосовать против кого-л., кто занимает официальный пост
• vote with one's feet    голосовать ногами
• voting by call    голосовать посредством вызова членов какого-л. комитета
• voting stock    граждане, пользующиеся избирательным правом

Español (Spanish)
n. - sufragio, derecho de voto, votación, voto, parecer, dictamen
v. intr. - votar
v. tr. - votar, pronunciarse, declarar

idioms:

• I vote    propongo que, Yo voto por
• one man one vote    una persona, un voto
• one person one vote    una persona, un voto
• put to a vote    someter a votación
• put to the vote    someter a votación
• vote down    rechazar, votar en contra de
• vote in    elegir
• vote of censure    voto de censura
• vote of confidence    voto de confianza
• vote of no confidence    voto de censura
• vote of thanks    voto de gracia
• vote out    derrotar en las elecciones, no reelegir
• vote with one's feet    indicar una opinión ausentándose
• voting by call    votación nominal, voto individual
• voting stock    acciones con derecho a voto

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - röst, omröstning, röster, röstsedel, rösträtt, anslag, budget
v. - rösta, votera, besluta, bevilja, anse, föreslå (fam.)

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
投票, 选票, 选举, 投票选举, 公认, 投票决定

idioms:

• I vote    我投给...
• one man one vote    一人一票制
• one person one vote    一人一票制
• put to a vote    进行投票表决
• put to the vote    进行表决
• vote down    否决
• vote in    选出, 选举
• vote of censure    谴责票
• vote of confidence    信任投票, 赞同
• vote of no confidence    不信任票, 不赞成的表示
• vote of thanks    公开铭谢
• vote out    在选举中击败
• vote with one's feet    表示不赞同, 以离去或逃避的方式表示不赞同
• voting by call    以口头表决的方式
• voting stock    有投票权的股票

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 投票, 選票, 選舉
v. intr. - 投票, 選舉
v. tr. - 投票選舉, 公認, 投票決定

idioms:

• I vote    我投給...
• one man one vote    一人一票制
• one person one vote    一人一票制
• put to a vote    進行投票表決
• put to the vote    進行表決
• vote down    否決
• vote in    選出, 選舉
• vote of censure    譴責票
• vote of confidence    信任投票, 贊同
• vote of no confidence    不信任票, 不贊成的表示
• vote of thanks    公開銘謝
• vote out    在選舉中擊敗
• vote with one's feet    表示不贊同, 以離去或逃避的方式表示不贊同
• voting by call    以口頭表決的方式
• voting stock    有投票權的股票

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 투표권, 투표의 표찰, 의결 사항
v. intr. - 투표하다, 의견을 내놓다, 동의를 내다
v. tr. - 투표하여 결정하다, 투표로 지지하다, 제안하다

idioms:

• put to a vote    한 표를 주다
• put to the vote    표결에 붙이다
• vote down    (투표로) ~을 부결하다
• vote in    ~로 선출하다
• vote out    투표에 의해 추방하다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 投票, 票決, 票, 投票用紙, 投票権, 投票総数, 投票結果, 賛否表示
v. - 投票する, 票決する, 認める, 提案する, 衆議一決する

idioms:

• I vote    提案する
• one man/person one vote    一人一票
• put to a/the vote    票決に付する
• vote down    否決する
• vote in    選出する
• vote of (no) confidence    信任決議
• vote of censure    譴責決議
• vote of no confidence    不信任決議
• vote of thanks    感謝の意を表す
• vote out    やめさせる
• vote with one's feet    決断してそこに行かないと決める

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) صوت, اقتراع, ورقه اقتراع, قرار, حق التصويت, ميزانيه, عدد الاصوات (فعل) صوت, تصويت, اقترع, صرح, وافق على, خصص‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮קול, הצבעה, פתק-הצבעה, דעה, החלטה, זכות הצבעה, מניין קולות, תקציב‬
v. intr. - ‮הצביע, בחר‬
v. tr. - ‮החליט או הקציב על בסיס רוב קולות, הכריז על בסיס הסכמה כללית‬

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