OUT BEFORE DAWN

Evening Star, Issue 25714, 11 February 1946, Page 5

OUT BEFORE DAWN

VOTERS TRUDGE THROUGH SNOW PROCEDURE AT THE BOOTHS (Rec. 10.30 a.m.) LONDON, Feb. 10. Voters throughout Russia flocked to the polling booths at dawn this-morn-ing in response to newspaper banner headlines appealing: " Everybody to the polling booths: Comrades, vote for the Communist and non-party bloc," says Reuter's Moscow correspondent. Moscow radio dropped all other news in favour of election reports, and several times during the night the radio rebroadcast Generalissimo Stalin's speech. Voters in the Far Eastern provinces trudged through .the snow immediately after Stalin's speech to record their votes. Two hours before the dawn, whole families, with children in arms, began to queue up in Stalin's cozistituency in Moscow. A Russian poet at one station, before casting his vote, read a poem praising the fairness of the elections. Voters were presented with two ballot papers at the polling booths. One paper was for _ the election of a Deputy of the Soviet Union, and one for the Soviet Nationalities, which together make up the Supreme Soviet. Each paper contained only one name, that of the candidate of the Communist and nonparty bloc. The voter, if he so desired, could privately examine the papers in a room curtained off from the rest of the booth, and strike off the | name of any candidate he decided to | vote against. The voter otherwise merely folded the papers and dropped them into a box without a mark. In the last election, in 1937, only 630,000 persons cast negative votes out of the 100,000,000 who voted. '