Definition
A faggot vote is a fraudulent or artificially manufactured vote, produced by nominally transferring small parcels of land to otherwise unqualified individuals for the sole purpose of meeting the property qualification required to vote for members of Parliament. The recipient of the transfer—the "faggot voter"—held the land in name only, typically as a device orchestrated by a patron, landlord, or political interest seeking to inflate the number of votes within a constituency. The arrangement was not a genuine conveyance; the land would often revert or be retransferred once the electoral purpose was served.
The term belongs almost entirely to the history of English electoral law prior to the major Reform Acts of the nineteenth century, when voting rights in parliamentary elections were tied to property ownership of a specified value. Because qualification depended on formal title rather than genuine beneficial interest, the loophole was systematically exploited.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The vote granted to a faggot voter, exploiting loopholes in the regulations.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Faggot" in the ordinary sense referred to a bundle of sticks or twigs bound together for fuel, or more broadly to any bundle or collection of things gathered artificially into a unit.
The legal meaning draws directly on the ordinary metaphor: just as a faggot bundles loose material into an artificial unit, a faggot vote bundles together nominal, insubstantial property interests to manufacture a qualification that has no genuine foundation. The gap between the common and legal meaning is real but not wide — the legal usage is essentially a deliberate metaphorical extension of the ordinary word, and understanding the common meaning illuminates the legal one.
Common Confusion
Faggot votes are sometimes loosely grouped with other forms of electoral corruption in historical sources — bribery, treating, or coercion — but the mechanism is distinct. Bribery involves paying an already-qualified voter to vote a certain way. A faggot vote manufactures the qualification itself; the fraud operates upstream of the act of voting rather than at the moment of voting. Researchers examining historical English electoral disputes should keep this distinction sharp, as the legal remedies and the parliamentary committee procedures addressing each differed.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of historical English electoral law with no direct modern American legal equivalent, but it surfaces in several research contexts that Law Mind users may encounter.
First, historical corpus materials covering English parliamentary elections from roughly the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century — particularly anything touching on rotten boroughs, pocket boroughs, or the reform agitation leading to the Reform Act 1832 — will use this term without explanation. Researchers unfamiliar with the property-qualification framework of pre-reform English electoral law may misread sources that treat faggot votes as simply a species of bribery or voter fraud in the modern sense.
Second, the concept has comparative relevance for researchers working on the history of voting qualifications in American law. Property requirements for voting existed in early American states, and while the specific "faggot" mechanism is not documented in American law by that name, the structural problem — formal qualification divorced from genuine interest — recurs in debates over taxpayer qualifications, poll taxes, and residency requirements. Sources discussing the Fifteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act (see Encyclopedia cross-references) sometimes trace the intellectual history of manufactured or manipulated voter qualifications, and the English faggot vote sits in that background.
Third, corporate law researchers will recognize a structural analogue in share-splitting and nominee shareholding schemes used to manufacture voting power in shareholder meetings. The faggot vote is occasionally cited in comparative corporate governance literature as a historical precursor to such arrangements.
The term does not appear in American case law or statutory materials under this name. If encountered in a primary source, it almost certainly signals an English, Scottish, or Irish electoral law context, or a comparative or historical discussion drawing on that tradition.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's is the primary historical dictionary source for this term in the Law Mind corpus, and its definition is brief but accurate: votes manufactured by nominally transferring land to persons otherwise disqualified from voting for members of Parliament. Bouvier captures the essential mechanism but does not elaborate on the historical context that gives the term its meaning.
Historical legal dictionaries generally treat this as a term of art requiring only brief definition because, by the time major American legal dictionaries were compiled, the property-qualification framework that made faggot votes possible had been substantially dismantled in England by the Reform Act 1832 and subsequent legislation, and had never taken the same form in American law. The term is therefore a marker of a specific historical and jurisdictional moment rather than a living doctrine.
What historical dictionaries miss is the parliamentary committee practice that developed to investigate and void elections tainted by faggot votes. The evidentiary and procedural dimensions of those proceedings — how nominal transfers were identified, what evidence sufficed to void a return — are not captured in dictionary definitions and must be sought in parliamentary records and specialized electoral law treatises of the period.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to the law of parliamentary elections in England, Scotland, and Ireland under the pre-reform property-qualification system. It has no recognized equivalent in American federal or state electoral law. Researchers working in a purely American law context are unlikely to encounter it except in historical, comparative, or background materials.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Racial Discrimination in Voting — The Fifteenth Amendment and Voting Rights Act (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia)
Shareholders — Shareholder Voting Rights and Mechanisms (The Law Mind Business Organizations & Corporate Law Encyclopedia)