A Second Ballot.

Opunake Times, Volume IV, Issue 190, 28 April 1896, Page 3

A Second Ballot.

A SUGGESTION BY MR McNAB.

Mr McNab, M.H.R. for Mataura, has devoted some attention to the question of the second ballot, and has evolved a plan which he claims would ascertain the views of the electors without the necessity for a second poll. He says that two elections to ensure that a candidate represented an absolute majority would be cumbrous and inconvenient. The electors were worked up to a climax at an election, and then the interest died out. They would not go to the same trouble to vote a second time. That argument applied especially in country districts, where the electors were sometimes put to great inconvenience and expense to record their votes. In the case of two elections, too, there was often a strange wave of populor sympathy with the defeated candidate. His plan is, in cases where there are three or more candidates for one seat, to band each elector a voting paper containing the names of the* candidates and instructions as follows : BKOWN BROWN JONES JONES ROBINSON ROBINSON

Leave in the name of Strike out the name the candidate you of the candidate vote for. you most object to. Then the votes on the left-hand side of the paper (the first ballot) would be counted in the ordinary way, the papers in favor of each candidate being kept in separate bundles. If the votes for the highest candidate were not equal to the votes of the other two candidates put together, the result of the second ballot would be ascertained. Suppose 865 votes were recorded for the third man on the first ballot. Then take those 865 votes (which, as stated before, have been kept in a separate bundle), and see whom the 865 voters favor in their second ballot, and distribute those votes between the remaining two candidates. This method could be adapted to any number of candidates, when it would become almost identical with the proposal that voters should indicate by figures the order in which they favored the different candidates. At Waikawa, where Mr McNab propounded his plan, a vote was taken among those in the hall where he delivered his address, in practical illustration of the new method of voting. The idea seems simple and worthy of consideration.