In this chapter, I claim that of the vast panoply of “external controls” existing or imagined more than two centuries ago, only the “periodic vote” endured over time. More significantly, I maintain that periodic vote was left on its own, that is, unassisted by any of a whole battery of instruments that might accompany the vote in the first (actual or imagined) republican systems (like the ones studied in chapter 7). In its resulting solitude -I claim- the vote lost much of its meaning and, above all, its power. How to hold accountable dozens of representatives, onhundreds of issues, for so long, with a single vote? And how to do all that (or somehow introduce some rationality into the system) without even a remote possibility of nuanced messaging to convey any message not on the ballot that any individual, sensibly and austerely, may want to transmit to their political officials?