Definition
A challenge to the poll is an objection made to an individual juror, directed at that specific person's fitness or qualification to serve. It is the counterpart to a challenge to the array: where a challenge to the array attacks the entire jury panel on the ground that the pool was improperly assembled, a challenge to the poll targets one juror at a time, raising a particular disqualifying fact about that individual.
Challenges to the poll take two primary forms:
1. Challenge for cause: An objection asserting a specific, legally recognized reason why the juror should be disqualified — such as bias, a prior relationship with a party, financial interest in the outcome, or failure to meet statutory qualifications. Courts have discretion to examine the juror and grant or deny the challenge.
2. Peremptory challenge: A challenge requiring no stated reason, exercised as of right, available to each party in a fixed number determined by the nature of the proceeding and applicable rules. Peremptory challenges may not be exercised in a racially or gender-discriminatory manner.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Poll" in contemporary English most commonly means a vote, an election, or a survey of opinion.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's gives "poll" as, among other things, "a head," and "an enumeration of persons"; also the place of voting. The head-count meaning is the operative one in legal usage.
Editorial note: The legal phrase "challenge to the poll" uses "poll" in the archaic sense of a counted individual — one head in the panel. Modern readers who encounter the phrase naturally import the electoral or survey meaning, which produces confusion. Neither Wiktionary nor Webster's captures the narrow legal application, and the phrase is essentially opaque without the historical gloss.
Common Confusion
Challenge to the poll is frequently conflated with challenge to the array, including in older legal writing where the terminology is used loosely. The distinction is structural: array challenges attack the formation of the entire panel before individual jurors are examined; poll challenges operate juror by juror during the empanelment process. A litigant may raise both types of challenge in the same proceeding — they are not mutually exclusive. The word "poll" here carries its older legal sense of an individual head-count or enumeration, not a vote or survey, which compounds the confusion for modern readers.
Why It Matters in Research
The phrase "challenge to the poll" belongs predominantly to older English and American common law vocabulary. Nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century case reporters and practice manuals use it freely; contemporary American sources have largely replaced it with the more functional "challenge for cause" and "peremptory challenge," making direct terminological searches unreliable across different time periods in the corpus.
Researchers working in historical criminal or civil procedure materials should expect the poll/array distinction to be the organizing framework for jury challenge doctrine. When the distinction disappears in twentieth-century sources, it does not mean the underlying concepts disappeared — they were absorbed and relabeled.
Jurisdictional variation matters here: English common law procedure, pre-Judicature Act materials, and American state practice diverge on the mechanics (number of peremptory challenges allowed, grounds for cause, procedural timing), but all share the poll/array structural vocabulary. Cross-referencing between English and American historical sources without accounting for this is a common research error.
The constitutional dimension of peremptory challenges — particularly equal protection constraints — is a modern American development with no counterpart in classical challenge-to-the-poll doctrine. Researchers should not read modern constitutional limitations backward into historical discussions of peremptory challenges to the poll.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary defines the term concisely: "A challenge made separately to an individual juror; as distinguished from a challenge to the array." This definition is accurate and captures the essential structural distinction, but it does not elaborate on subtypes (cause versus peremptory) or historical mechanics.
Older editions of Black's and contemporaneous dictionaries such as Bouvier's Law Dictionary give more extended treatment, distinguishing principal challenges (bias, interest, prior conviction) from challenges to the favor (partial affection or prejudice short of principal cause), both of which fall under the poll challenge umbrella. This subcategory of "challenge to the favor" is largely absent from modern sources and from Black's brief entry, creating a gap for researchers reading early English and colonial American materials where the distinction carried procedural weight.
Older treatises on jury practice — Proffatt on Jury Trial (1877), Thompson & Merriam on Juries (1882) — develop the poll challenge vocabulary at length and are the more reliable reference points for historical research than any dictionary entry alone.
Jurisdictional Note
English practice historically recognized a broader taxonomy of cause challenges than most American jurisdictions adopted. American states varied considerably in the number of peremptory challenges allowed and in the procedural moment at which challenges to the poll must be made. Federal practice is now governed by the Federal Rules of Criminal and Civil Procedure, which use the modern terminology throughout.