Ancient Rome’s Voting System Was More Rigged Than You Think

When the monarchy collapsed in 509 BC, Rome became a republic. From then on, freeborn adult male citizens got the right to vote (ius suffragii) when they reached adulthood, around ages 15 to 17, marked by putting on the toga virilis, the white toga of an adult man. On paper, these men had a political voice. In practice, however, Rome’s voting system made some citizens’ votes far more powerful than others.

Under Roman law, women had civitas, the legal status of citizenship. They could own and inherit property, enter a lawful marriage with a Roman citizen, and have children who were citizens too. What citizenship did not include was the vote or public office: both ius suffragii and ius honorum were denied to women, without exception. Roman women were citizens in every respect but one. They never received a ballot.

Enslaved people were legally considered res, things or property, under Roman law, as opposed to persons who could have rights and privileges. That included no voting rights whatsoever. Once freed, a slave could gain both voting rights and citizenship. But until then, he had no path to voting at all.

Early Rome was dominated by the patricians, an aristocratic class whose status was inherited. Only patricians could hold political power. The common people, plebeians, had no say in things even though many of them were wealthy. They were kept from office simply because they had been born into the wrong class. To protest, plebeians sometimes used a tactic called the secessio plebis: they would leave Rome en masse until the patricians acceded to their wishes. What ensued was called the Conflict of the Orders and lasted some 200 years.

In 287 BC, the Lex Hortensia put an end to the Conflict of the Orders, the centuries-long conflict between patricians and plebeians. It stated that plebiscita, resolutions passed by the Plebeian Council, should be binding law for all Roman citizens, including patricians. The patricians, however, were not permitted to take part in the Plebeian Council. On the surface, it was a major equalizer. In actuality, though, things were far from level.

The Comitia Centuriata, Rome’s highest assembly, was made up of 193 “centuries,” voting groups that were not literally a hundred men each and were very unequal in size. Each century received just one vote, based on what the majority of its members wanted. This meant 97 centuries could win an election outright. The system heavily favored Rome’s wealthiest citizens. Before reforms in the 3rd century BC, the cavalry and the richest property-owning class controlled enough centuries to dominate the vote.

Sometime between 241 and 216 BC, the First Class was reduced from 80 to 70 centuries by reformers. Now with 18 cavalry centuries thrown in, the wealthiest had 88 votes, still short of the 97 needed for victory. It was the first time that the rich had to rely on the help of the Second Class to make up the difference. The rich were still ahead, but could not win without aid.

In Rome, the poor people, the proletarii or capite censi, were so far down the property ladder that they were all assigned to a single century of the 193 centuries in which voting was conducted. The classes were called upon from wealthiest to poorest. And once 97 centuries had voted, voting stopped. This meant that in most cases, the vote of the proletarian century wasn’t called for. There was no rule explicitly stating that the poorest citizens should not vote. It just usually didn’t come up.

By 241 BC, Rome’s second popular assembly, the Comitia Tributa, was made up of 35 tribes, 4 urban and 31 rural. The Concilium Plebis (from the earlier plebeian council) was the same assembly, but only plebs could vote. Unlike the Centuriate Assembly, tribes were not divided into classes based on wealth. Instead, geography introduced a different kind of bias.

When a slave was freed, the freedman became a citizen with the right to vote. But the censors, the magistrates who ran the five-yearly census and assigned citizens to tribes, put nearly all freedmen into the four urban tribes, while freeborn Romans from the countryside filled the 31 rural tribes and kept their voting strength. Freedmen could vote. Their votes just didn’t count for much.

Roman voting was done in person, either at the Forum or on the open ground of the Campus Martius. There was no absentee voting, no proxy voting, no postal voting, nothing. People who lived in the countryside throughout Italy could rarely afford the trip to Rome. Only around 2 to 10% of eligible citizens could vote, says the historian Henrik Mouritsen, with venues capable of accommodating only between about 20,000 and 70,000 voters. Most citizens of Rome never got to vote.

Those communities with Latin Rights, a limited form of legal status that fell short of citizenship, could vote in the Tribal Assembly if they were in Rome, but only one tribe, randomly selected, could cast its ballot. Provincial subjects, even those who paid taxes to Rome, were not allowed to participate. If you lived in Rome, you had some power. But not much.

Under the clientela, a form of patron-client relationship, lower-class citizens were supposed to vote for their richer patrons. It wasn’t enforced by law, merely by the sense of duty or fides, which means loyalty. However, because ballots were publicly announced when voters cast them, patrons could easily find out how their clients voted. The next reform sought to put an end to this.

In 139 BC, the Lex Gabinia replaced the public, oral vote with tabellae, small wax or wooden tablets, which were marked in secret. Although patrons were no longer able to watch clients mark their votes, there were still ways to circumvent the secrecy. It was, however, a major step in the direction of protecting the individual voter in an electoral system based upon group voting.

Until 119 BC, elites watching from the “bridges,” raised wooden walkways inside the voting precinct called pontes rather than bridges over the Tiber, could peer down and see the ballots of fellow Romans as they were cast. Then the tribune Gaius Marius passed a law narrowing the walkways so that observers could no longer lean over and watch. Ballot secrecy finally had enforcement behind it.

In the Centuriate Assembly, the first vote was cast by the centuria praerogativa, a junior century drawn by lot from the First Class’s iuniores, men aged 17 to 45. Its result was announced before anyone else voted. Romans treated it as a religious omen, and it swayed those who voted next. It didn’t decide an election by rule; it set the mood.

Once secret ballots made it tough for patrons to see how their clients actually voted, patrons and candidates resorted to a more direct form of influence: straight money. Candidates began hiring divisores, middlemen whose job was to distribute bribes to entire tribes at a time. As a result, ambitus, the crime of organized electoral bribery, became a widely discussed feature of late-Republican politics. Patrons lost social control, but candidates gained political power instead.

Over half of Rome’s army was provided by her Italian allies, who paid taxes and fought for Rome for generations, yet none of whom were Roman citizens or could vote in Roman elections. These Italians revolted in the Social War of 91 to 87 BC. The Lex Julia of 90 BC offered citizenship to Italian allies who remained loyal to Rome, and citizenship was subsequently granted by further laws to those who laid down their arms in 89 BC. According to the census returns of ancient Rome, the number of registered citizens grew from approximately 394,000 to approximately 910,000 between the censuses of 115 and 70/69 BC, more than doubling within a generation.

In 49 BC, the praetor Lucius Roscius Fabatus introduced the Lex Roscia, at the request of Julius Caesar, which granted full Roman citizenship and voting rights to the free population of Transpadane Gaul, a region north of the Po River. It was Roscius’s bill, but Caesar achieved his objective.

Rome’s popular assemblies were often disrupted by gang violence during the late civil wars (the struggles that produced Julius Caesar and then Augustus). Augustus maintained the facade of elections in the Campus Martius, but he used his official “recommendation” of candidates to determine which individuals could run. In 14 AD, a short time after Augustus died, the emperor Tiberius handed the power of electing magistrates over to the Senate. The era of popular voting was over.

This content was created with the help of AI.