Other forms: ballots
A ballot is the paper or the process by which people cast their votes. A secret ballot, spoil your ballot, a postal ballot.
Ballot box, ballot paper and ballot rigging are the standard compounds. A ballot is also the vote itself: hold a ballot, a strike ballot. And it means allocation by lot, which is how many marathon places and concert tickets are distributed: enter the ballot. Note that the secret ballot was a major nineteenth-century reform, introduced in Britain in 1872, and was contested at the time.
1nounballotThe paper or process by which votes are cast.
“The ballot is secret, so no one will know how you voted.”
2nounallocationAn allocation decided by lot.
“Places are given by ballot and about one in twenty gets one.”
ballot is a way of voting or allocating.
Italian ballotta means a little ball. Venetians voted by dropping coloured balls into a box, which is where both ballot and blackball come from — a black ball meant a rejection.
Proto-Germanic
*balluz — ball
Proto-West Germanic
*ballu — ball
Middle French
balote
Italian
balota
English, today
ballot
Built from
Italian balota obsolete, ballotta (“small ball, especially one used to register a vote”), from balla (“bale, bundle”) + -otta; or from Middle French balote obsolete, ballotte (“small ball used to register a vote”) (also compare Middle French balotiage, French ballottage (“second ballot, runoff”)); both ultimately from Proto-West Germanic ballu (“ball”), from Proto-Germanic balluz (“ball”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA