The original "democracy" was that of ancient Athens. I know very little about the subject, but as I understand it, it was not a "pure democracy" as we define it today but more of an oligarchy. Perhaps it was merely the Greek counterpart of the Latin res publica.
In Athens they had an interesting way of voting.
People put the name they wanted for office on a pottery shard. The shards were put into 12 white pots whith numbers on them. A black pot had shards with the numbers 1 through 12 on it. A shard from the black pot was selected at random, and all the votes from the pots not selected were thrown out. The selected votes were redistributed into the 12 white pots, and the process was repeated until a single name was chosen.
They also did the same thing with votes to ostracize.
The idea was, given that not many could count very high, there wasn’t much trust in totaling up the votes. They could see which pot was selected. There wasn’t much reason for vote fraud, as “The G-ds” were able to control who was selected by any vote. Yet, getting lots of votes did make your candidates election more likely.
Women didn’t vote. Slaves didn’t vote. Foreigners didn’t vote. Yet the franchise was widely held, for the standards of the time.
This is why you see people saying idiotic things like "fascism (or Falangism, Nazism, etc) was a left-wing movement." They try to define the political spectrum in other cultures and other times in terms of the issues that define the Right and Left in America today. While they're at it, perhaps they can inform us whether Athenians or Spartans were Democrats or Republicans in the Peloponnesian war?