The campaigning went on for rather a long time, partly because there was no single national election day in 1800. Instead, voting stretched from March to November. Voting was done in public, not in secret. It also hardly ever involved paper and pen, and counting the votes—another affair of calculation—usually meant counting heads or, rather, counting polls. A “poll” meant the top of a person’s head. (In Hamlet, Ophelia says, of Polonius, “His beard as white as snow: All flaxen was his poll.” Not until well into the nineteenth century did a “poll” come to mean the counting of votes.)