THE ELECTORAL BILL.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5437, 30 August 1878, Page 2

THE ELECTORAL BILL.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW ZEALAND TIMES. Sir, —I notice that the hon. the Attorney-Ge-neral,in his reply in the debate on the Electoral Bill, admitted “ that there were matters of detail connected with the Bill that required correction/’ and he is also repotted to have said, “ Mention had been made of the ballot papers, the numbering of which had been objected to,” and he suggested that “the only way to obviate that difficulty would be to provide only one polling place for the whole district. If they had a large number of polling places and only one electoral roll, then these papers must of necessity be numbered, otherwise they would have one man going from one polling place to another and recording his vote at each of them. In Victoria elections had been worked that way for years, and no objection had been made to it.” As I happen to have taken a part in several general elections in Victoria I venture to express an opinion in reference to the above argument quoted from the Attorney-General’s speech as reported. In the first place, he is under a misapprehension as to the reason why the ballot papers are numbered. The Victorians have a better and a simpler method than that for preventing “ one man going from one polling-place to another and recording his vote at each of them.” Soon after the Victorians first adopted manhood suffrage, they found that although the ballot papers were numbered on the back, yet voters who were mere birds of passage, and had left the district, and were not personally known to the scrutineers, were often personated by strangers brought from another dis trict to personate them. At one election some hundred loafers were taken from Melbourne into the country to personate electors who were either dead or had left the district, or were known to be voting at another polling-place. The managers of this extensive fraud were convicted at the criminal sessions of the Supreme Court. The Attorney-General’s attention is referred to it as showing that the numbering of the ballot papers did not prevent the personation of voters or the repetition of the same vote at different polling-places. But the Victorians having soon after that applied an effective remedy, the Attorney-General, who is a student of the working of Victorian institutions, would do well to introduce the Victorian system into this Electoral Bill. All electoral districts in Victoria were divided into as many divisions as there were polling-places required, and there was a separate electoral roll for each division in the electoral district, and each voter could only record his vote at the polling place within the division on which his name was recorded, and each roll for a district is separately numbered. Under this system no voter can vote twice; neither can a voter be personated after he has recorded his vote, and if he is personated before that detection is certain.

It was found in Victoria that the principle tempatiou to carry out a systematic personation of voters arose from the manhood suffrage men being placed on the roll of a district where perhaps they had only temporary employment, and election, committees marked the names of those strangers on the roll, and induced other strangers to personate them at the elections. I have seen this done extensively by parties in self-defence, because the other side ,did the same thing ; but, as a rule, the candidate knew nothing of how his return was carried. The way the Victorians cured this evil was to require those who were claiming a vote on account of their manhood and residential qualification to make a personal claim, under their own handwriting, to the Registrar, and the claim, with the manhood voter's signature, appeared in a book for the electoral division where he resided, and where he would have to record his vote; and every manhood elector could be required to sign his name in the polling-booth, alongside of his first signature, as evidence that he was the same man. This is the reason why manhood voters require to claim in writing, to show that as they have no fixed stake in the district that they are really the person who claimed to bo placed on the roll of their division, and not some other person of the same name. The voters’ signature easily shows this. The Victorians require the manhood suffrage voter to pay a fee of Is. to the Registrar, to cover expense of recording and checking his claim to vote, and if any man who has no stake in the country will nob take the trouble to make a personal application to have his name placed on the roll, and pay a Is. to have his name registered and to get his sign manual witnessed by the Registrar, then such a person has no great cause of complaint for being excluded from the roll. The Victorian working classes approve of this way of excluding loafers from outvoting them at elections.—l am, &c.,‘ An Old Colonist. 2fith August.