The Press. TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 1871.

Press, Volume XVIII, Issue 2491, 25 April 1871, Page 2

The Press. TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 1871.

We find from the English papers that a .Government Bill has been introduced into the House of Commons, under the charge of Mr Forster, for the regulation of elections. A similar measure was brought in last year; but the Irish Lands Bill and Education Bill left little room for other business, and it was dropped with a number of others at the close of the session. Its reintroduction so early in the next session is a proof that the Government really intend to carry it through. The Bill—which applies to municipal as well as to Parliamentary elections I —is based generally on the recommendations of a Select Committee appointed two years ago to consider the whole subject of the management of elections. It does away with the hustings nomination of candidates and the declaration of the poll. It prohibits the use of public houses as com-mittee-rooms during the progress of an election —a step, no doubt, towards closing the public houses altogether on polling days, after the American fashion. It enacts that a member shall lose his seat for procuring or attempting to procure personation—a singular omission in the existing law, under which he retains his seat and is simply guilty of a misdemeanour. It throws all the legal expenses of an election, that is to say, the expenses of the Returning Officer (which at the last general election amounted to £92,000, and will be larger in future in consequence of the enlargement of the constituencies) upon the county rates. And it establishes the ballot. The last is a noticeable provision. That the ballot should be proposed and accepted so much as a matter of course shows what a change public opinion has undergone since the days when the annual repetition of Mr. Berkeley's motion was tolerated as a harmless crotchet; or still more, since Sydney Smith ridiculed the whole system of secret voting in a witty pamphlet which proceeded throughout on the assumption that a tenant's votes weie the property of his landlord. The method proposed to be adopted for taking the votes is simple enough. That is a point on which Mr. Forster laid particular stress. During the time he had been in charge of the question, he said, he had been astonished at the number of complicated machines that had been brought under his notice, showing a wonderful ingenuity in those who took an interest in the matter. But the objection to them all was, that the machinery required must not be only such as would work well if properly handled, but such as would bear being handled very badly. Considering the number of officials and people who have to do with voting, if the arrangements are at all elaborate or complicated, mistakes are certain to occur. This is exactly what we have often remarked in connection with the claim to vote required by our Colonial Registration Act. Anything in the shape of an elaborate form, however easy it may really be, is to many persons a certain stumbling-block. Mr Foreter mentions that at the recent elections for the London School Board, in which the voting was by ballot, he was " quite surprised to find how many cases there were of men of great intelligence who seemed unable to understand that they had to follow one or two very plain directions." Some few voters actually eigned their papers ; and Mr Forster stated, to the amusement of the House, that amongst those signed papers was one which bore the signature of " an eminent legal firm, largely engaged in electioneering matters." The conclusion, therefore, at which Government had arrived was that the machinery for taking votes must be as simple as possible. The Bill provides that the elector on entering the voting room shall receive an official paper, none other being allowed to be used, and shall not be permitted to put any mark upon it except that which is necessary to show for whom the vote is In the event of this regulation being broken, the vote will be cancelled. To guard against the possibility of forged voting papers being used, the Returning Officer is directed, " as he gives out his paper to each voter, to impress it with a stamp, the character of which he is bound to keep secret, and which shall not be used again till a certain fixed time ehall have expired," and when the boxes come to be opened, any unstamped voting-papers will be rejected as void. When a paper has once been placed in the ballot-box, the box shall not be opened unless under such precautions as shall secure the inviolability of the vote. The form of the voting paper, and the mode of indicating for which candidate the elector wishes to vote, are of course set forth in a schedule to the Bill. Mr Forster also alluded to various other precautions, of which his speech contains no detailed description, for securing absolute privacy to the electors, and effective safeguards against any sort of improper practice. But the most remarkable feature in the Bill is that it deliberately abandons any attempt at a scrutiny. Mr Forster laid down the broad principle " that the very essence of the ballot is that it should be completely secret;" by which he explained himself to mean, I that there should be no possibility of ! proving how any elector had voted. Many plans have been devised for enabling a scrutiny to be made. In the Bill of the previous session a system of counterfoils had been proposed. An eminent advocate of the ballot suggested that the voting papers should be marked with invisible ink, which should be rendered visible, if required, by chemical means. But Mr Forster, in the name of the Government, boldly declared that none of these proposals were ■worth adopting. In the first place, he said, they would takeaway very much from the simplicity of the

mode of voting; and secondly, "it was felt that if we are to have the ballot at all we ought tc have it complete, so that the voter ehall have perfect confidence that his vote will be secret," With regard to frequent voting and personation, two dangers to which the ballot is said to be specially exposed, he maintained that it offered no greater facilities for either practice than existed under the present system. Under a system of open voting, he argued, " an elector might go from one polling-booth to another, and so record his vote twice; but that such a thing should be possible was due to the manner in which the register was kept, and not to the method in which the vote was recorded." He reminded the House that there was a distinction between knowing the fact that a man had voted and knowing how he voted ; and that "in the most secret of all possible systems of ballot, however impossible it was to follow the vote, there was nothing to prevent the voter from being followed." He contended that, if a man voted twice over or in the name of some one else, the ballot system would interpose no difficulty to the detection and punishment of the imposition ; and, with reference to to the measure he was introducing, declared that, so far from facilitating personation, it would render it much less likely to occur than it was at the present moment. The Bill appears to have been well received in the House, though an abundance of amendments, principally on matters of detail, were promised in Committee. The opinion of the London press ia somewhat less favourable. The Daily News, indeed, praises the bill unreservedly; bufc the Pall Mall Gazette warmly opposes the abolition of the scrutiny; while the Times declares it to have raised many questions which it considers very carelessly, and even hints that, having served the purpose of raising a discussion on the subject, it had better be left to perish in the annual massacre of the innocents. But we think there is no doubt the Bill will pass. Is may be true that within the House the Liberal party, as a body, cares little about the ballot; but the working clasaeß do care for it, and are bent on having it. Their influence since the late extension of the suffrage is irresistible; .and, after all, they are the class for whose protection the ballot is proposed, and must be the best judges of how far it is necessary.