In the United Kingdom, universal suffrage is less than one hundred years old, and the secret ballot has not been around much longer (since 1872). Both factors have influenced the number of people recorded in records of elections and the types of records available.

Lists of citizens eligible to vote must be prepared before an election. They are usually referred to as voters' lists or electoral rolls. Before the use of the secret ballot, election polls were also published, giving the names of voters and who each person voted for.

Who Could Vote
In order to vote before 1832, those in the countryside had to be male, over twenty-one, and in possession of freehold land that could be rented for forty shillings a year or more. In the cities and boroughs qualifications varied, in some only freemen and in others all householders.

Look at a map of England and draw a line from the mouth of the River Avon, just north of Bristol, to the Wash on the east coast. In the election of 1831, the last before passage of the first reform bill in 1832, a limited and prosperous electorate returned 70% of the members of Parliament from the area south of that line.

In Scotland, not many qualified. There is a published list of all electors in 1788 and fewer than 2700 are named A View of the Political State of Scotland in the Last Century, by Sir Charles Adams, 1887.

In addition to a limited franchise, there was by the 1800s a huge problem with representation. One tiny constituency, Old Sarum, had one voter; and Manchester, with a population over 160,000, was not yet recognized as a borough. After the Napoleonic Wars, in difficult economic times, public unrest was largely directed at the need for parliamentary reform to voter qualifications and the distribution of constituencies.

The Geography of Elections
Before searching for voters' lists and poll books you must know not only the date range of interest, but also the county and the vicinity where your ancestors lived. In addition, a search is better focused when you identify in advance the places where polling occurred and the boroughs that sent members to parliament.

One source of geographic information is the Topographical Dictionary of England. (Read the articles on the place and the county.) Another is Pigot and Co.'s British Atlas of the Counties of England, (1840, republished in 1997) where you can find succinct descriptions for each county; for example, this one for Herefordshire.

“By the Reform Bill the borough of Weobly is disenfranchised; and one additional member given to the county: the whole shire, therefore, now returns seven representatives to Parliament, instead of eight as heretofore.

“The election of members for the county is held at Hereford, and besides that town the polls take place at Leominster, Bromyard, Ledbury, Ross and Kington.”

Poll Books and Electoral Rolls
Poll book reveals the names of the freeholders, places of abode (parish only), and how they voted; some include the location and type of qualifying properties and names of occupiers. Electoral rolls have been compiled annually since 1832 and contain similar details without the voting information.

Libraries and archives hold poll books and lists of electors, some are for sale on CD-ROM, microfiche, or in books, and some can be found online.

Survival is unlikely before 1711 when legislation required lists to be deposited with the county clerk of the peace.

The Family History Library holds print and film copies of a large number and another good collection is in the library of the Society of Genealogists, London. The Society has published a list of its holdings, Directories and Poll Books in the Library of the Society of Genealogists (5th ed., 1995) and sells several titles on microfiche www.sog.org.uk. The Federation of Family History Societies shop sells reprints of poll books and electoral rolls, fourteen titles in all www.ffhs.co.uk.

County record offices and town libraries hold original poll books and electoral rolls. Check to see if the repository has an online catalog.

Electoral lists also exist for county council elections from 1889.

Conclusion
Elections generate pages and pages of newspaper reports and opinion and it was no different in the past. You can get a taste of this within Ancestry.com's Historical Newspaper Collection. The first election after passage of the first reform bill in 1832 was held on December 31st. On January 2nd 1833, The Times newspaper reports with favor on the success of Reform candidates in the county of Durham and that James Davies, tollbooth keeper at Hunslet in Yorkshire, collected tolls from those en route to vote in Wakefield. Apparently electors had the right to free passage and he had to give the money back.

Reports and records of election records not only reflect on society at large and the local scene in particular, they provide genealogists with fairly frequent lists of gradually increasing numbers of male citizens.

ADN Editor's Note: Samuel Lewis's' A Topographical Dictionary of England is available to subscribers to the Ancestry.com U.K. and Ireland Collection by clicking here.

The Historical Newspaper Collection, which includes several U.K. titles, is found by clicking here.

Sherry Irvine, CGRS, FSA (Scot) is an author, teacher, and lecturer specializing in English and Scottish family history. She is the author of Your English Ancestry (2nd ed, 1998) and Your Scottish Ancestry (1997) and she is a regular contributor to several journals including Genealogical Computing. Since 1996, she has been a study tour leader, course coordinator, and instructor for the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research at Samford University. She teaches online for the family history program of Vermont College and has lectured at conferences in Canada, the United States, and Australia. She is past president of the Association of Professional Genealogists.