Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
block vote

block vote

1 6.1
A vote by a delegate that counts for the number of people they represent
  • noun
  • Literature
translation icon : voto en bloque
  • The committee decided to use a block vote to quickly pass the new policy on behalf of the entire group.

Examples

  • What happened is the arrival to a definitive status of America's Latino population, which was able to overrule the most solid European-American block vote in the modern era.

    Blog text (29)

  • In the meeting, the delegate cast a block vote representing all the members of their union.

  • During the election, the representatives agreed to a block vote to ensure their collective interests were prioritized.

Surface Forms

block vote singular
block votes plural

Morphology

block + vote

The meaning is partly compositional: 'block' can be understood as a grouped unit and 'vote' is the electoral act, so learners can infer a collective or bundled voting concept. However, the specific institutional sense (a delegate's vote counting for multiple individuals) is technical and requires knowing 'block' in the 'bloc/group' sense rather than the basic concrete sense, so it is not fully predictable for a B1 learner.

Etymology

Block vote comes from the picture of a whole block (a group) voting as one: a delegate casts a single vote that stands for many people. That's why it means one vote that counts for the number of people the delegate 'represents'.