Commonly and incorrectly. It's like asking how to weld steel using milk and pasta -- the very question is ill-formed. Voting has very different problems than what distributed timestamping (a.k.a. blockchain) solves.
> A helpful answer would be something more than "lol read up n00b"
And I didn't specify the field the OP should read about? And on what problems? I think I did. It really takes one trivial query in Google to get a grasp, and I provided the necessary keywords.
The validating that a vote was counted appropriately probably could be used in a block chain type mechanism, but may need to be more with a zcash type of implementation.
I'm a true believer that more tech is not the right answer for voting security. (At least for the near term). Voter-verified paper ballots, that can be run through open-source tabulators and then stored for a subsequent mandatory audit would be ideal (3-5% is the target I think we've gone for in Cali).