THE FRANCHISE BILL

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 303, 19 June 1912, Page 5

THE FRANCHISE BILL

TWO AND A HALF MILLION EXTRA VOTERS. THE REDISTRIBUTION QUESTION. By Cable—Press Association—Copyright. Received 18, 9.40 p.m. London, June 18. In the House of Commons the Franchise Bill was read a first time. Mr. J. A. Pease, president of the Board of Education, stated that the Bill provided a qualification of six months' continuous residence for all over twentyone years of age, removal from one electorate to another not to interfere with the right to vote, but if a voter allows his name to appear on two registers he will he fined £2OO or a year'g imprisonment. The abolition of plural voting ■would reduce the number on the register by 525,000, and the abolition of the university representation by 49,614,but two and a half million voters would be added owing to the continuous register. If the franchise were extended to women on the same terms it would add another ten and a half million voters. Mr. Pease adtoitted that the case for redistribution was unanswerable. , The Unionist papers approve of a simpler franchise, but demand that it shall, be accompanied by redistribution, which is a greater anomaly. The Times states that the Government intends to proceed with the Bill sufficiently to allow a women's suffrage amendment to be moved in committee.

The Master of Elibank. in a message to the Midland Federation at Birmingham recently, said bluntly: In the immediate future we shall enter also upon a struggle for the old Liberal principle of electoral reform, when, among other things, we shall propose a drastic measure of registration reform, which shall make it as easy for the poor man as for the rich to find his way on to the register and so to the polling both, and we shall deal with the plural voter in such a way that that übiquitous buccaneer shall henceforth cease from troubling.