SOVIET EXTENDS FRANCHISE

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 November 1934, Page 5

SOVIET EXTENDS FRANCHISE

BELLRINGERS AND WARDENS. MOSCOW, October G. Bellringers, choristers, churchcleaners, watchmen, and even churchwardens are granted, by a Soviet decree issued to-day, the right to vole in coming elections to the Soviet. Priests or other ministers of religion, past, op present, are not included. The new decree also enfranchises a large number of peasants who lor various good reasons, such as sickness, absence from home on public business, or us seasonal workers in building trades or in factories, employ not mere than one paid helper without any suggestion of •‘capitalist exploitation” or greed for gain. Some few picturesque, but scarcely numerous, types of citizen —persons living on their winnings in Soviet State lotteries, interest on new State loans, or on foreign currencies sent in from abroad, through regular State bank channels, will also in future enjoy the same privilege. The right to vote by a show of hands under the one-party system might not appear a coveted one, but the deprivation of it means that one is regarded as an outcast, and often exposed to all manner of vexations. This may take the form of eviction from living quarters, or oven worse. Moreover, enfranchisement, though not giving any right to ration cards, does provide the right to try to find work in concerns where such cards are available. The present amendments to the franchise law, therefore, show a definite, if a mild, liberal trend. The law of the civic outlaw, however, remains absolute against priests, tradesmen, all former capitalists, former White officers, former police officials and magistrates and all officials of the old regime, unless by five years’ productive work they have proved their “regeneration.”