Voting and Elections Trivia
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99 free Voting and Elections trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Americans vote on a Tuesday because of church, mud and market day. The secret ballot is named after Australia, the word gerrymander after a Massachusetts governor and a salamander, and ostracism after broken pottery. New Zealand let all women vote in 1893; France waited until 1944; Saudi Arabia until 2015. These 99 questions are built for civics classes and election-night parties alike: how many electors there are and how many you need, which two states split them, why 1845 matters, the four suffrage amendments and what each did, Seneca Falls, Wyoming and Tennessee's 50-49 vote, Kate Sheppard, the Voting Rights Act and Shelby County, the first city with a secret ballot, Belgium and Australia's compulsory voting, packing and cracking, Iowa, Super Tuesday, swing states, exit polls, the long ballot and the Landsgemeinde. Easy questions ask what a midterm is; hard ones ask which country votes at 25. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a government class.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many electors are in the US Electoral College?
538
538 electors mirror Congress, 435 representatives plus 100 senators, with three more for Washington, D.C., so every census reshuffles how many each state holds.
Q 02How many electoral votes does a US presidential candidate need to win outright?
270
270 is a bare majority of the electors; when nobody gets there the House of Representatives picks the president, as it did after the 1824 election for John Quincy Adams.
Q 03Which two states split their electoral votes by congressional district instead of winner-take-all?
Maine and Nebraska
Maine and Nebraska give one elector to the winner of each congressional district, so Democrats took a single 'blue dot' vote out of Republican Nebraska in 2008, 2020 and 2024.
Q 04Which state has the most electoral votes?
California
California has 54 electoral votes to Texas's 40, even though it lost one after the 2020 census, the first time in the state's history that its count shrank.
Q 05Which amendment gave Washington, D.C. its three electoral votes?
Twenty-third
The Twenty-third Amendment, ratified in 1961, caps the capital at the electors of the least populous state, so Washington has had exactly three in every election since 1964.
Q 06What is a member of the Electoral College who votes against their pledged candidate called?
Faithless elector
A faithless elector can be fined or replaced: after several broke their pledges in 2016, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 2020 that states may hold electors to them.
Q 07US federal Election Day is defined as the Tuesday after the first what in November?
Monday
Monday: the 1845 law's wording, 'the Tuesday after the first Monday', means Election Day can never fall on November 1 and always lands between November 2 and 8.
Q 08Why was Tuesday originally chosen for US elections?
So farmers could travel after church
So farmers could travel after church: Sunday was for worship, polling places were often a day's ride away, and Wednesday was market day, which left Tuesday.
Q 09Why was one presidential election day fixed in 1845?
Early results swayed others
Early results swayed others: until 1845 a state could vote any time in a 34-day window, so news from those that went first could shape turnout and opinion in the rest.
Q 10Elections held two years after a US presidential election are called what?
Midterms
Midterms put every House seat on the ballot halfway through a president's term, and the president's party usually pays: since 1934 it has gained House seats only three times.
Q 11US senators serve terms of how many years?
Six
Six years is three times a House member's term, and until the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913 the Constitution had state legislatures, not voters, elect senators.
Q 12Which amendment recognised American women's right to vote?
Nineteenth
The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, too late for Susan B. Anthony, who had been arrested for voting in 1872 and died in 1906.
Q 13Which state cast the decisive 36th ratification of women's suffrage in 1920?
Tennessee
Tennessee ratified after 24-year-old Harry Burn, who had been voting with the opponents, switched sides on the advice of a letter from his mother.
Q 21Which president signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965?
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson called for the law a week after state troopers beat marchers at Selma in March 1965, telling Congress 'we shall overcome'; he signed it that August.
Q 22Which 2013 Supreme Court case struck down the Voting Rights Act's preclearance formula?
Shelby County v. Holder
Shelby County v. Holder freed states with a history of discrimination from clearing voting changes with Washington; within 24 hours Texas said its blocked voter ID law would take effect.
Q 23Which barrier to voting did the Twenty-fourth Amendment ban in 1964?
Poll taxes
Q 14In which town was the first US women's rights convention held in 1848?
Seneca Falls, New York
Seneca Falls, New York drew about 300 people, among them Frederick Douglass, who spoke up for the demand that women get the vote when many there wanted it dropped.
Q 15Which US state joined the Union in 1890 as the first to give women full voting rights?
Wyoming
Wyoming Territory had let women vote since 1869 and kept the right at statehood, which is why it calls itself the Equality State; Colorado's men voted to follow in 1893.
Q 16Which country was the first to give all women the vote in national elections, in 1893?
New Zealand
New Zealand's women voted just ten weeks after the law was signed in September 1893, yet they could not stand for parliament themselves until 1919.
Q 17Which suffragist led the 1893 petition campaign that first won women the vote in national elections?
Kate Sheppard
Kate Sheppard's campaign delivered three petitions, the last with nearly 32,000 signatures, and once the vote was won she spent the ten weeks before the election getting women enrolled.
Q 18Which of these European countries only gave women the vote in 1944?
France
France gave women the vote by a decree Charles de Gaulle issued in 1944, and they first cast ballots in 1945, decades after German, Danish and Dutch women.
Q 19Which country granted women the vote for the first time in its 2015 local elections?
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia let women vote and stand for the first time in December 2015, and women won seats on several councils, more than two years before they were allowed to drive.
Q 20The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, barred denying the vote on account of what?
Race, color or past servitude
Race, color or past servitude were the only grounds it named, so states found other devices to keep Black citizens from the polls until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Poll taxes survived in five states in 1964, and because the amendment covered only federal elections, states could keep charging them in their own until the Supreme Court ended that two years later.
Q 24What did the Twenty-sixth Amendment do in 1971?
Lowered the voting age to 18
It lowered the voting age to 18 and was ratified in about 100 days, faster than any other amendment, at a time when 18-year-olds were being drafted for Vietnam.
Q 25What was the US voting age before the Twenty-sixth Amendment?
21
Young men could be drafted at 18 but had no say in the war until 21.
Q 26Which country became the first in the European Union to lower its national voting age to 16, in 2007?
Austria
Austria cut its voting age from 18 to 16 in 2007, in time for 16-year-olds to vote in the 2008 parliamentary election; outside Europe, Brazil had let them vote since 1988.
Q 27Anonymous voting on paper slips in a sealed box is nicknamed after which country?
Australia
Australia's colonies introduced government-printed ballots marked in private in 1856, and the system was copied in Britain and the United States under the name 'Australian ballot'.
Q 28What name was given to the partly punched scraps of card that held up Florida's 2000 presidential recount?
Hanging chads
Hanging chads clung to punch-card ballots by a corner, so counting machines missed the votes and officials had to judge each card by eye; in 2002 Congress paid states to scrap such machines.
Q 29Which country has the world's oldest surviving compulsory voting law, dating from the 1890s?
Belgium
Belgium has compelled its citizens to vote since the 1890s, and although the fines are now rarely enforced, about nine in ten Belgians still turn out.
Q 30In which year did the country that gave the secret ballot its nickname make voting compulsory?
1924
Turnout before that ran between 47 and 78 percent of eligible voters.