LOCAL BODY ELECTIONS.

Evening Star, Issue 18925, 27 April 1925, Page 6

LOCAL BODY ELECTIONS.

The prayer wheel, in some Eastern countries, makes devotions easier for the worshipper. He turns a handle, and his orisons aro multiplied with a minimum of trouble to himself. The “ ticket ” system in elections offers the same advantage. To balanie the qualifications of some dozens of candidates and choose rather less than half of them who might be best fitted for filling administrative posts would be a heavy strain on the knowledge and the discriminative capacity of tho ordinary voter. It would he a strong temptation to him, if no assistance were given to him, either to simplify the task by voting for only a proportion of the candidates required to be elected, or to shirk it altogether and remain aloof from the polls. But his labor is reduced obviously to the simplest mechanical action if someone else will make the selection for him, leaving him no more to do than to reduce the names which he finds on the official ballot papers to those which are presented on a ticket. Both the Labor Party and what is known as the Citizens’ League have been assiduous in recent local body elections in Dunedin to perform this service for him. Like the ladies in “Utopia,” they might say: ‘“You only need a button press, and wc do all the rest.”

The system is had. Potentially at least it takes too much responsibility away from the voter. If he has independence enough to regard the tickets merely as a classification of candidates from which lie can make his choice, as also from other names which are not included in- them, they may be a useful guide for him. But if he is content to take the easiest path, adopting one ticket or the other as it is put before him with no further thought, ho becomes something less than a voter in any real sense. The only effect which that method, pursued by a majority of electors, could have would bo to make either the Labor Representation Committee or the Citizens’ League, whichever might have the more influence in the community, the sole selectors of those who should fill its public offices. Democracy would he reduced to an absurdity. It must be admitted that something like a reduction of democracy to absurdity is afforded in any case by these elections, which require, in the present instance, that twenty-four members of throe local bodies shall be selected on the same clay by a general vote of citizens out of fiftysix who are offering themselves for election. It is not to be expected that any body of voters should be able to balance the individual claims of such a multiplicity of aspirants for office in the manner that is desirable. To make that possible, the elections for the different bodies should be held on different days. The combining of them means, in practice, a larger vote, and it has also the advantage of economy, but those are its only advantages. Protests have been made against the ticket system. Candidates who have no affiliation with Labor, and who find-them-sclves excluded from the league’s list, have been provoked to ask in effect: “ What is this Citizens’ League, and who made it a guide and a dictator to the community ? ” They are natural questions, and the league gives its answer to them in a letter which we publish today, It is a better answer than some questioners might have expected. I he ticket system is admitted to he bad. W r o should say ourselves that it would be excellent in a country like Mexico, for example, but that it is a most pathetic expedient in Dunedin. There is force, however, in the contention that, if one side is to have a ticket, there must be another ticket to reply to it. It was Labor that originated the system here, and the Labor ticket rests on the worst principle. From first to last it is a. class ticket and a political one. The chief claim which is recognised, apparently, in its selection of candidates for administrative, not political bodies, is that they shall bo affiliated to the political Labor Party, and hold belief in its chief article of faith, which is the “ socialisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.V It would bo just as rational a test of fitness if they were required to believe in the Lotsy theory of hybridisation, or to be CaliUmmpiaus jn religion.

Henco we get a ticket from the Labor Representation Committee which allows no present member of the City Council, for example, to have done well or to ho deserving of re-election except one, which is plainly absurd. We have criticised the Council upon occasion, but wo never dreamed that eleven members of it could find substitutes with advantage. By the Labor ticket everyone is excluded for public positions except the representatives of one class. The Citizens’ League at least eschews that narrowness. By the name which it has taken it proclaims its interest in tho whole community, irrespective of class, and it explains that if Labor candidates could have been found by it who would be ready to be, if elected, representatives of the whole community, and not responsible before anything else to the Labor Representation Committee, it would have been glad to include them in its list. It is satisfactory to learn that the league itself rests on a broader foundation, and that its decisive meeting was much more largely attended than might have been gathered from some criticisms of its activity. There are dangers inherent in this league system, but we believe that, at the present time, it is working for good. That is not to say that in its selection and also in its rejection of candidates it is incapable of making mistakes. We should certainly vote for some aspirants who are not on the league’s ticket.