No Secrecy In Voting

Northern Advocate, 24 November 1947, Page 5

No Secrecy In Voting

Chinese Poll

NANKING, Sun. (11.30 a.m.) China’s first national elections are not yet completed but already election officials have begun hearing charges of fraud and incompetence.

The elections, which began on Friday and end tonight, are to elect 3024 members of the National Assembly which will draw up a new constitution and elect a President. Correspondents in the major cities comment on the widespread apathy of electors and the unsatisfactory voting procedures. The Nanking correspondent of the New York Times says most voters are far more obsessed with the difficulties of life under conditions of civil war and inflation than with the new experiment in democracy. MARKED IN PUBLIC

There was a lack of secrecy in voting. _ . Ballots were marked in public with election officials and curious bystanders looking on. It is estimated that 70 per cent of the total population are illiterate. Many people who could not write and also undoubtedly could not read either, passed through the polling booths without saying one word. Their voting card was handed to them by one official. Another took it and wrote three Chinese characters in the three rings provided and handed back the card to the voter who proceeded to a sealed box where it was safely deposited. According to Hsin Min Pao, a proGovernment newspaper, an organised gang went from house to house, collected identification cards from the occupiers and then proceeded to the booths and recorded mass votes for hundreds of householders. Madame Chiang Kai-shek cast her first vote when all women over the age of 21 became eligible to go to the polls. Roughly one-quarter of China’s population of 450,000,*. 00 people will be prevented from voting because of the civil war while the 8,000,000 to 10,000,000 overseas Chinese in Siam, Hongkong, the Netherlands East Indies, the Philippines and the United States will be unable to record their votes.

The Kuomintang (National Party) has virtually no opposition. Pro-Government sources declared that 20,000,000 Chinese men and women—one-tenth of those eligible—voted in the election, but neutral observers doubt whether the total reached 10,000,000.

OBITUARY.—The death has occurred of Mr A. P. Grant, engineer and chief executive officer of the Soil Conservation and Rivers' Control Council. He was aged 49.