An election is a method of choosing among candidates for some post or office, and elections have become the only fully respectable method for selecting political leaders and governors throughout the world. Even a country which is universally known to be a dictatorship or military regime will frequently use fraudulent elections to disguise their actual mechanisms for political selection.
Elections can be carried out by a wide variety of techniques. Votes can be given to individuals, as in most national elections, to collective entities (for example national delegations to the United Nations) or to institutional units (for example trade union branches). The voting procedure may be secret, public or even recorded and published, as in many legislative assemblies.
Votes may be counted according to any one of a dozen or more methods ranging from varieties of pure proportional representation to the simplest ‘first-past-the-post’ plurality system (see voting systems). All that elections have in common is that they are a method of selecting one or more candidates for office from a wider field by aggregating the individual preferences and counting them. Historically, elections have been only one among many methods of selection, and they became the totally dominant method only in the 20th century. There is no necessary connection between elections and democracy, for even monarchies have been elective, and the selection of leaders in one-party states involves election, though the effective electorate is likely to consist of a handful of leading party figures, even if their choice is then submitted to a confirming ‘popular’ election. In fact elections will occur whenever selection does not depend on the will of a single person, force, or some special concept of legitimacy.
This is the complete article, containing 280 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
