Politics 101 BC: Voter Fraud In The Ancient World

Published 5:00 pm Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Yes, there’s evidence of voting irregularities in ancient Athens.

What does that evidence look like, you may ask? Well, pieces of pottery, to start. That’s because Athenian voters used pottery shards as ballots when they voted to ostracize somebody. (An ostracism was when Athenians voted to send somebody out of the city for 10 years. Listen above for more about how that “kick the bum out” system worked).

Michael Clapp / OPB

Ellen Millender is a professor of Classics and Humanities at Reed College in Portland.

Voters would scratch the name of the person they wanted to exile on pottery shards (called, in the plural, “ostraka”). Seems pretty straightforward, right? No hanging chads! But, there were still problems with this system, as Reed College Classics and Humanities Professor Ellen Millender explains to OPB’s Eve Epstein:

This story originally appeared on Oregon Public Broadcasting.