Voting Procedure at Late Republican Legislative Assemblies

Summary There is widespread agreement that during legislative and judicial assemblies of the Republican comitia tributa and concilium plebis each tribe was called to vote one at a time in sequence. However, despite this model’s general acceptance, it is only a hypothesis and is not proven by explicit evidence. A review of the evidence indicates that multiple tribes could have voted at the same time, either grouped into successive waves of several tribes at once or all thirty-five together. Sequential voting remains a possibility, but it is not the only voting procedure that is consistent with the sources and it may be less attractive than the alternatives. Ancient writers indicate that legislative assemblies could sometimes attract very large crowds but only needed a relatively short time to finish voting. This does not seem possible using sequential voting procedures, which are conventionally reconstructed as being extremely slow and ponderous, whereas the alternate voting procedures proposed in this article allow significantly larger and faster assembly participation than has usually been supposed. Legislative voting need not have been as onerous as is often thought, and ordinary Romans were not necessarily discouraged from participating in public lawmaking by the burden of the voting process.