APPARATUS FOR VOTING BY BALLOT.

Evening Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2149, 26 March 1870, Page 2

APPARATUS FOR VOTING BY BALLOT.

(From the Daily Trleyraph.) “The machinery of State” will, sooner or later, be the ballot-box ; and the safer, simpler, more effectual, and less expensive that machinery can be made, the greater hope will there be of its working thoroughly to the satisfaction of all political parties. When the advocates of election by ballot, who are gaining in numbers and influence session after session, shall succeed in passing the bill which Mr Berkeley has brought forward annually till he has left himself nothing to say on the subject, and which was lone ago declared by Sir Arthur Hallap; Elton to be rather more a Conservative than a Radical measure, it will bo necessary to adopt some such apparatus as Messrs Crnttenden and Wells exhibited on Friday and Saturday last, at the Terminus Hotel, in Cannon street. Their model, one-fourth the size of the proposed machine, was placed on a table, and looked something like the cabinet in which the Brothers Davenport used to piny on spiritual banjos, and perform other mystic solemnities, after they had been tied up with cords, and the gas had been turned

off. But, as we shall presently see, the folding door in the side front of the cabinet is not for ordinary use, and is to be kept locked except when occasion shall require it to be opened. The entrance and exit for the voter are two narrow doorways, one at each end. The doors are revolving turnstiles with four leaves. Let us suppose that a free and independent elector is about to vote for a burgess after his own heart, to advocate popular rights and abolish popular wrongs so soon as he shall get into Parliament. The intending voter, armed with the certificate of his qualification, presents himself at the entrance door, and takes from an attendant one, two, or throe balls, according to the number of representatives who are to be elected. Assume the case of a borough returning two members. It does not signify how many candidates may be dividing this or that interest, the voter receives two ballotting balls, and no more. He then enters ; and no sooner has he got inside than the revolving flange which has admitted him is followed by another flange, resembling the red baize covered door of a Government office, without the usual pane of glass in the top panel. By the action of sjmple machinery beneath the floor, the voter is locked in the cabinet, which is of course well lighted. He sees on one side a row of font-shaped cups which project from the wall of his prison, and which are the mouths of holes in divers compartments. Above each cup is a concave fluted channel, sloping down towards the voter’s hand, so that if he were to drop a ball into the channel, it would roll down into the cup and disappear immediately. The channels are various’y co’oured —red, blue, white, black, yellow, green—all very pronounced and uumistakeablc tints ; so that if the early education of the voter shall have been neglected, and he be unable to read the name of the candidate for whom he proposes to plump, the pleasing distinction of color may guide him. If the voter should be blind, he can count the cups by feeling them as he walks along. As we have said, tlicre is a ball for each Parliamentary seat that has to be filled ; but there is a cup for each Candida*-o, and his name plainly appears at the top of the fluted channel. There is, moreover, a neutral cup, into which the man who does not like to vote for anybody, but who is driven to the poll by any imaginable consideration, can drop the ball or balls. Shut from the sight of the voter, there are indicating discs below the cups, and the numbers will he read off at the close of the poll. Each ball, separately deposited, turns the index and m-rks one vote ; but if the elector places more than one ball in the cup of a single candidate, no additional effect is gained ; that is to say, so long as the voter remains within the cabinet, and the machinery is uninfluenced by the revolving doors, he can only move the index by dropping the fiist ball, and the one or two balls which may follow go to waste. If the voter could see the index he might perceive that it moves only half-way from one figure to the next ; but the act of exit sets in motion another lever, and completes the register of the vote. Every possible requirement of the ballot is thus fulfilled. The vote cannot but be secret, for it would be impossible that any voter should afterwards prove how he had voted. He is compelled to deposit the balls in one or more of the cups ; because the mechanism is so contrived as to return them immediately to the hand of the attendant at the entrance door, and the voter who might attempt to depart without having performed his duty to the State would be stopped as soon as he got past the exit. The expedition of the plan recommends it above any other that has yet been proposed ; and the result at the close of the poll is immediate and indisputable. It sometimes happens that a voter who is a cripple or an invalid comes to the poll in a wheeled chair. In that case the folding door at the side of the cabinet is unlocked and thrown open, the chair is wheeled in, the door is closed, and the voter is left until he gives a signal, when he is brought out in the same manner. An attendant is then sent through, the end doors to set the machinery in motion, and to complete the operation of the vote. It is not easy to conceive how the apparatus devised by Messrs Crutkenden and Wells can be surpassed by any invention, however ingenious.