SYDNEY ALDERMANIC ELECTION.

Otago Witness, Issue 3249, 21 June 1916, Page 46

SYDNEY ALDERMANIC ELECTION.

SYDNEY, June 14. An important High Court decision has b.-on delivered on the recent city aldernianis election. It was discovered tiiat 13 strangers had been allowed to vote in the nances of others who- were entitled to vote but did not. The State Supreme Court decided that the candidate for whom these votes were recorded was not duly, elected, and granted an ouster order. An appeal against this order was made to the High Court, which by a majority granted the appeal, the dissentients being the Chief Justice and Sir Edmund Barton. The Chief Justice (Sir Samuel Griffith), in delivering tho decision, invited public attention to the state of the law, which showed that if sufficient personators to turn the scalo had voted, yet such an election was valid, and could not bo upset. As a majority of the High Court Bench had ruled thus, he was bound to accept their decision as correctly declaring tho state of the law until it was over-rulod or altered, but he could not believe that it expressed the deliberate will of Parliament or the people of the commonwealth.