Definition
"Polls" carries three distinct legal meanings, all derived from the underlying sense of "heads" or "individuals counted one by one":
1. Voting places. The polls are the physical locations where registered electors appear to cast their votes. "Going to the polls" and "opening/closing the polls" are standard electoral idioms rooted in this sense.
2. Individual persons; heads counted singly. In older common law usage, "polls" meant persons considered individually rather than collectively — heads enumerated one by one, as in a poll tax (a tax per head) or a poll of the jury.
3. Challenges to the polls. A challenge to the polls is a juror challenge directed at specific individual jurors composing the panel, as distinguished from a challenge to the array, which attacks the entire panel as improperly assembled. The Latin equivalent is challenge in capita (by heads). Blackstone identifies both forms at 3 Bl. Comm. 358, 361.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of "poll" — surveys of opinion, voting places, or the act of voting.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The head; by extension, a person; an individual in an enumeration; also, the place of voting in an election.
The gap here is partial rather than complete. Common modern usage has narrowed "polls" almost entirely to the electoral and opinion-survey senses, losing the older meaning of enumerated individuals. Researchers encountering "polls" in older legal texts — particularly jury practice materials — must recognize that the word may have nothing to do with voting and everything to do with the counting of persons one by one.
Common Confusion
Challenge to the polls vs. challenge to the array. These are the two fundamental categories of juror challenge in common law practice, and they are frequently conflated. A challenge to the array attacks the entire jury panel on grounds of improper selection or summoning — a structural objection. A challenge to the polls targets one or more specific jurors for cause or peremptory reasons — an individual objection. The distinction matters because the grounds, procedures, and remedies differ. Historical sources sometimes use "polls" loosely when they mean the panel as a whole, compounding the confusion.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Law Mind materials will encounter "polls" in at least two very different documentary contexts, and conflating them produces research errors.
In election law materials, "polls" means voting locations. Statutes governing poll hours, poll watchers, and poll books use the term consistently in this sense from the colonial period forward. The meaning is stable but the surrounding regulatory framework changes dramatically — early American materials tie polls closely to property qualifications and viva voce voting, while post-Reconstruction materials address secret ballots, registration requirements, and federal oversight.
In common law pleading and jury practice materials, "polls" means individual jurors or individual persons enumerated. This sense is most active in treatises and case reporters from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. A researcher reading pre-twentieth-century trial practice materials needs to recognize "challenge to the polls" immediately as a juror challenge, not an electoral reference.
Poll tax materials present a third context: the per-head tax assessed on individuals regardless of property. These materials overlap with both election law (poll taxes as voting prerequisites, later prohibited by the Twenty-Fourth Amendment for federal elections) and general tax history. The connecting thread is the "head count" meaning of polls.
Cross-corpus trap: opinion polling — the modern survey sense — is almost entirely absent from the historical legal corpus. If a researcher encounters "poll" or "polls" in a nineteenth-century legal text, assume either the voting-place or the per-head sense, not the survey sense. The survey meaning postdates most of the historical legal dictionary sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries present a consistent but thin picture. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier agree on the voting-place definition and note the juror-challenge sense, with Black's providing the Blackstone citation as authority. Burrill goes furthest in explaining the Latin derivation (capita) and the per-head meaning, making explicit the conceptual link between counting individuals and the challenge-to-the-polls doctrine.
None of the source dictionaries addresses the opinion-polling sense, which had not yet developed as a legal matter when these dictionaries were compiled. None addresses the poll tax's constitutional dimension, which became salient only with the Twenty-Fourth Amendment (1964) and the Supreme Court's subsequent extension to state elections in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966) — developments entirely outside the historical dictionary corpus. Researchers relying solely on historical dictionary sources will find these materials silent on the most constitutionally significant uses of "poll" in twentieth-century American law.
Burrill's entry contains an apparent printing artifact — a fragment of a definition for "POND" appears mid-entry, suggesting a typesetting error in the source. This does not affect the substantive legal content but flags the need for caution when citing Burrill directly on this term.
Jurisdictional Note
The challenge-to-the-polls doctrine is a common law inheritance shared across American jurisdictions, but procedural details — number of peremptory challenges, grounds for cause challenges, and appellate review standards — vary significantly by state and by federal rule. The voting-place and poll-tax senses are governed by a mix of federal constitutional law, federal statute, and state election codes.