baloti

The word is a little ball, and that is not a metaphor. Ballotta is Venetian for a small ball. The Venetian republic voted by dropping one into an urn, and the word for the object slid onto the procedure, then onto the paper that replaced the object, then into half the languages of Europe. Every time you say baloti you are handing over a pebble. English ballot is the same loan and hides the same thing.

Where it sits against voĉdoni. These are not free variants, and the distinction is worth holding even though many speakers have let it go.

• Voĉdoni at rank 1,323 is literally to give your voice: to vote in any manner at all, including a show of hands, an acclamation or a click on a website. It is the general word and the safe one.
• Baloti is to vote by a countable token, secretly and recountably. The urn, the paper, the box. That is what the root actually says.

ReVo notes that the two are often used as near synonyms today and that the etymological line has largely worn away, so nobody will misunderstand you either way. But if you are writing about an election, baloti is the word that means the ballot rather than the opinion, and it is the more precise choice.

The family is where you will actually meet it. Baloto is a ballot or an election, balotado the process of voting, balotilo the ballot paper itself, balotujo the ballot box (-uj-, the container suffix), balotejo the polling station and balotanto a voter. In Esperanto organisations, which elect committees constantly, that whole set is ordinary working vocabulary.

One thing it is not. Baloti is not elekti. You balotas to do the choosing, and the result is that you elektas somebody. Ni balotis kaj elektis novan prezidanton is the natural sentence and both verbs earn their place in it.