Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: towards a historical ethnography of voting / Romain Bertand, Jean Louis Briquet and Peter Pels -- The secret ballot in nineteenth-century Britain / Frank O'Gorman -- Uses and abuses of the secret ballot in the American age of reform / John Crowley -- 'Chad wars': voting machines and democracy in the United States / Denis Lacorne -- Voting in India: electoral symbols, the party system and the collective citizen / Christophe Jaffrelot -- Imagining elections: modernity, mediation and the secret ballot in late-colonial Tanganyika / Peter Pels -- The engineers of democracy: election monitoring agencies and political changes in post-Suharto Indonesia / Romain Bertrand -- Politics in the village: voting and electoral mobilisation in rural Corsica / Jean-Louis Briquet -- From acclamation to secret ballot: the hybridisation of voting procedures in Mexican-Indian communities / David Recondo -- Commodification of the vote and political subjectivity in Africa: reflections on the case of Benin / Richard Banégas -- Return of the repressed: Indonesia's new order elections revisited / John Pemberton -- Elections in Iran: religion, nation and the public sphere / Mahmoud Alinejad.