Psephology can also be called electoral analysis or voter analysis. It refers specifically to the study of elections, voting behavior, polling, turnout, and electoral trends — not politics in general. It comes from the Greek “psēphos,” which originally meant “pebble,” but it came to mean “ballot, vote” because in ancient Greece pebbles were used to vote. Today, of course, we no longer use pebbles, and even paper ballots have been phased out in favor of electronic voting. Modern psephology involves complex analysis of polling data and demographic research.