Old Style Catholic Voting Box (Santiago de Compostela Museum)

During our stop in Santiago de Compostela, we visited Santiago de Compostela Cathedral Museum where they had many different interesting things to see, starting from the old choir chairs to Spanish tapestries. There was a particular room in this museum that got my attention, it looked like an office (or at least that is how I saw it). The room had a chair, desk, and books, but against the walls it had two boxes and in front of the desk there was a silver bowl.

Neither the boxes or the silver bowl had a description of what they were and do to that part of the group was very curious to know more about them. The box ifself was black and white, it had small rectangular holes on both side of the box, it was used many years ago by the Catholic Church to make votes. Sometimes they would bring topics and issues that couldn’t be resolved easily so they would put them into votes. The rectangular holes where for the voters to insert their vote into the box. They had two options, a black token for negative (no) and a white token for positive (yes). After everyone was done voting they would count each token and go for the highest score. This method has not been used in years and the last time the church had to put something on votes was two years ago with a different method.

The second method and now used is a silver or gold jar, where they can put a piece of paper voting “yes” or “no” to the topic being discussed. We did not have any explanations or reasons of why the method was changed, but I think it might be because is more efficient, requires less space and it looks more modern. After taking the votes and counting them, the votes are placed in a silver bowl where they get burn, and that bowl is only used for that specific reason. 

For me the voting system years ago was different, it looked very private and practical. Even though is not in used nowadays, back in the day, that was the only system that was used to vote. At the museum we were not allowed to take pictures and for that reason I don’t have a way to show you what it looks like, but I can tell you it was a very interesting box.