Our project focuses on ballots held in cities and villages under supervision of the Swiss cantons in order to choose between either the reformed ideas or the teachings of the Roman Church. We want to understand why a vote was considered by parishioners and magistrates as the right path to a wise religious choice and under which circumstances such ballots were organized in the 16th century.

In order to analyse the process and its whereabouts, the SNF-funded “Reformation and Ballots” project works in close partnership with the Pôle histoire numérique of LARHRA (CNRS/Universités de Lyon et Grenoble) where the symogih.org project is hosted. symogih.org provides an open modular platform that stores geohistorical information and allows researchers to share their knowledge in a collaborative and interlinked environment. The information is organised around a CIDOC CRM compatible, event-centered extensible model: already existing classes and properties are chosen by the participants according to the project's research agenda, or new ones are created in order to allow the production of project specific data.

At the workshop, we would show how this model makes it possible to get new insights in some crucial aspects of the voting process in Reformation times, such as the definition of questions and items submitted to the voters or the identification of the actors allowed to cast a vote. The symogih.org information system further allows to unveil the complex networks of alliances and overlapping jurisdictions characterising the relations between communes, parishes and magistrates which determined if a community would be allowed to vote on its faith or not.