Ballot election

Election by ballot is a process by which certain parties, individuals, or policies are selected by a vote. A government which is selected by this principle is known as a representative democracy or "indirect democracy".

Some authors criticize ballot elections as inimical to the spirit of true democracy, citing instead direct democracy, in which many responsibilities typically held by officeholders are delegated to popular referenda; or sortition, the random selection of representatives from the masses, as alternatives to the process. In order to distinguish electoral government from these other democratic mechanisms, these authors sometimes use technical neologisms such as psephocracy or psephonomy in reference to the Ancient Greek practice of using pebbles (Greek: psêphos) in place of paper ballots.

Ancient Greek authors made distinctions between democracy and other forms of government. Aristotle, for example, was clear about the mechanisms which were considered "democratic":

I mean, for example, that it is thought to be democratic for the offices to be assigned by lot, for them to be elected oligarchic, and democratic for them not to have a property-qualification, oligarchic to have one....

— Aristotle, Politics Book IV

The vast majority of states in the world are based on ballot elections of representatives such as deputies and presidents. In addition to bourgeois republics, many socialist states have incorporated ballot elections into political systems which otherwise differ from the example of the bourgeois states, including soviet democracy, by which workers and peasants directly elect representatives to serve in larger bodies. Cuba and North Korea are two examples of modern left-wing states which incorporate voting into their political system.