COMPULSORY VOTING

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19748, 22 January 1927, Page 6

COMPULSORY VOTING

It is reported in a recent issue of the New York “Times” that an efiort is to be made in the United States to introduce compulsory voting at general elections. Senator Arthur Capper, of Kansas, has given notice of his intention to introduce a measure during the current session of Congress providing that “citizens of the United States who are legally qualified to vote shall pay an additional tax of one per cent, of their gross yearly incomes after 1927 unless it can be shown that they have voted in the last preceding election of President, Congressmen, or United States Senators, or were prevented from doing so by unavailable absence from their homes, by sickness, or by other serious disability.”

If this measure becomes law the first payment under it will be due in 1929, and it will probably add a huge sum to the Trea»sury receipts. There were at least twenty-eight million qualified people who failed to vote in the Presidential election of 1920—about a million more than 50 per cent.—and in the Senatorial elections two years later the percentage of voters in nearly every State was even smaller. In some of the States, Senator Capper told the “Times” in justification of his measure, fully two-thirds of the eligibles “stayed at home, went fishing, or passed the day in other ways undisturbed by thoughts of the election,” with the result that many of the successful candidates received “as few as seven, nine, or ten per cent, of the “total eligible vote.”

There are precedents for compulsory voting in America, though apparently not in Kansas. In the year 1705 the Colony of Virginia ordered every citizen failing to vote to forfeit 200 pounds of tobacco to the person reporting his negligence—a far more wholesome state of aairs, Senator Capper thinks, than that existing 221 years later, when “in the year of our Lord 192 G the political bosses of the more or less sovereign State of Pennsylvania have decreed that virtually any citizen who is reluctant to vote may be enrolled as a ‘watcher at the polls’ at a stipend of six dollars.”

If voting were a religious or moral duty it would certainly be pleasanter to think of Virginia in 1705 than of Pennsylvania in 1926, and if compelling people to vote compelled them to vote wisely and for the general good—if, especially, it guaranteed them someone good and wise to vote for—we could all wish Senator Capper luck in his round-up of the missing millions.