The Fielding Star. Published Daily. FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 1894. LICENSING LITIGATION.

Feilding Star, Volume XV, Issue 275, 30 March 1894, Page 2

The Fielding Star. Published Daily. FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 1894. LICENSING LITIGATION.

' The predictions made to the effect that immediately after the licensing \ elections, and local option polls had p been completed, there would be much r litigation are about to be fulfilled. The first note of the tocsin of legal warfare has been sounded at The Thames, Auckland, where the Returning Officer having ruled that in- * formal votes could not be included in , the aggregate of voters who went to , the poll, the Temperance party intend testing the question in the Supreme Court. At the other end of the colony, in Dunedin, we are told by telegram that an attempt will be made to . upset the elections there on technical grounds. For the information of our readers we may be permitted to point ! out that in Section 18 of the Alcoholic Liquors Sale Control Act it is clearly laid down that the Returning Officer can only take into account the actual votes recorded, and as informal papers are necessarily thrown out, they have ' no legal value under the Act, inas--1 much as they cannot be so recorded. , It is just as well, perhaps, that the 1 elections should be fought over again i in the law courts with all convenient s despatch, so that the weak points in the Act may be exposed, and thus allow the Cabinet to introduce to the House an amended Act to strengthen them, or to remove them altogether. Who is to bear the expense is a very serious matter, because if the Returning Officers have to defend actions arising out of the local option voting the question of whether they, or the local bodies on whose behalf they nominally have acted will have to bear the burden of the legal costs and charges, will be a difficult one to decide. One thi"g is certain, the members of j the ) £<il profession are likely to reap a golden harvest.