Undervotes

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A situation in which voters do not select a candidate on a ballot for a specific office despite casting votes in other races
2. A phenomenon occurring during an election when fewer votes are recorded for a particular position than for other contests
3. An occurrence where individuals participate in a voting process but abstain from making a choice for certain positions on the ballot

Etymology: Election officials have a name for the ballots that record no choice in a given race: the votes that were "under" the contest, so to speak. The term combines the prefix "under-", meaning below or insufficient, with "vote", a word that reached English from Latin "votum", meaning a vow or solemn pledge, and that came to mean a choice expressed at the ballot box. An undervote, then, is a shortfall in the expected count: a voter who marked a ticket but left one contest blank, or an election in which one office drew fewer ballots than the others on the same form. The plural, "undervotes", is simply the form used when counting many such shortfalls, as in tallies of how many ballots skipped a particular race. The base word "undervote" is a plain compound of "under-" and "vote", with no older English history of its own, so its meaning follows directly from its two parts.