Ancient Greeks Voted to Kick Politicians Out of Athens
- Post by: electionsystems
- November 30, 2021
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Politicians have not been liked for a long time, dating back to ancient times.
As Beth Gannon, an Archaeology Correspondent at the Smithsonian, writes in her article, Ancient Greeks Voted to Kick Politicians Out of Athens if Enough People Didn’t Like Them , “In the 1960s, archaeologists made a remarkable discovery in the history of elections: they found a heap of about 8,500 ballots, likely from a vote tallied in 471 B.C., in a landfill in Athens. These intentionally broken pieces of pottery were the ancient equivalent of scraps of paper, but rather than being used to usher someone into office, they were used to give fellow citizens the boot. Called ostraca, each shard was scrawled with the name of a candidate the voter wanted to see exiled from the city for the next 10 years.”
She continues that, “The extraneous remarks on ostraca, alongside other irregularities like misspellings and crossed-out letters, indicate that no strict format for the ballots had been established. It seems that voters didn’t even have to write on their own ballots. Scholars have found several examples of ostraca that fit together, as if broken from an old pot on site, with matching handwriting as well, suggesting some Athenians helped their friends and neighbors write down their vote. Archaeologists have also found a trove of seemingly unused but mass-produced ballots against the general Themistocles in a well on the north slope of the Athenian Acropolis.”