11

H.—39

But the Independent has not labelled himself Tory, and the official Liberals have not labelled themselves Tories ; they have all called. Jthemselves'Liberals. And[they have availed themselves (let us. assume) of a provision of the party-list system that lists may be grouped—that is, they have told the Eeturning Officer in advance remainder which either list has shall be used to help the other list. The Returning Officer now carries out this direction ; he adds the Independent Liberal's 17,000 votes to theVLiberals' spare 24,333, making 41,333, a total much larger than the 27,333 spare votes of the Labour party, and the Liberal party thus gets a second seat. And this, as we saw, is the fair result. The seats have now been allotted to the parties. All that remains is to ascertain which candidates shall be returned for each party. Here, again, the system is simple ; there is no quota or surplus, or exclusion, or anything of that sort to occupy the Returning Officer and his staff all night through. If a list is entitled to return two candidates the Returning Officer declares elected the two candidates on that list who have received most votes. If there are several candidates equal the Returning Officer must toss up or decide in any way he pleases. And that is all. The party-list, of course, has difficulties ; there is no electoral system which has not; but these can wait for a second article. In our first article we saw how simple the party-list system is. At the polling-booth it is simply the familiar " block " vote which we use for the Senate recorded on a ballot-paper on which candidates are arranged according to their parties. In the Returning Officer's room it requires only a simple rule-of-three sum and the result of the election can be ascertained within a few minutes after the totals for the candidates at the various polling-places are received. It gives proportional representation, and every one can understand how it gives it. Within a party it enables the return of the candidates most in general favour, and it allows a voter to give equal Votes to several candidates. But now we have to point out a peculiarity not altogether in favour of the party-list system, and to consider some of the objections to it. Let us have before us again the ballot-paper and the totals for the candidates in the example we used in our first article : — Ballot-paper. LABOUR. LIBERAL. INDEPENDENT LIBERAL. Gray . . 1 Bakhap . . Cameron .. Hurst .. 1 demons f. . —■ —■ .. 1 Keating .. Totals for the Candidates. Gray .. 32,000 Bakhap .. 31,000 Cameron.. 17.000 Hurst .. 32,000 demons.. 31,000 — .. 32,000 Keating .. 31,000 Total .. 96,000 Total .. 93,000 Total .. 17,000 The peculiarity of this system, in contrast to the single transferable vote, is that a vote is no longer a vote only for candidates as individuals—it is a vote also for the candidate's party. "In the first place," says an English writer, " it is a vote for the party-list as such, and is used for determining the proportion of seats to be allotted to the lists ; and in the second place it is a vote for a particular candidate for the purpose of ascertaining which of the candidates included in a list shall be declared successful." To take an example : Some of Mr. Bakhap's friends among the miners are Labourites, but they would like to see their neighbour in the Senate even if that means that there will be one Labour senator less. Accordingly they vote—Gray 1, Hurst 1, Bakhap 1. Now the 1 that Mr. Bakhap gets from such a paper is not only counted in his own total, but it is counted in the Liberal total; also, it is lost from the Labour total. If the election is close and many of Mr. Bakhap's friends do this it may mean that the Liberals will get a seat which otherwise would have gone to Labour. If this extra seat goes to Mr. Bakhap this is, of course, what his Labour friends intended, and they have secured what they wanted. But the point is that this seat, which the Liberals are to have solely because Mr. Bakhap's Labour friends voted for him, may not go to Mr. Bakhap. It may happen that, in spite of the Liberal League, many Liberals will vote for the three retiring senators, leaving out Mr. Bakhap ; and if they do so the candidates with most votes in the Liberal list will be Senator Clemons and Senator Keating, and these two and not Mr. Bakhap will be elected. So that Mr. Bakhap's friends have not only failed to get him in, but they have put in Senator Clemons, for whom they have no use, in place of the second Labour senator whom they might have returned. Cross-voting, then, is very dangerous with the party-list, or at all events with the form of it which has been described here. There is a party-list system in use in Finland in which the voter indicates his order of preference. Mr. Bakhap's friends would thus be able to say that if their votes were no use to him they were to go to the Labour senators, and were not on any account to be used for Senator Clemons ; but we are not.likely to adopt this, for the principal reasons for a change from the single vote to the party-list are the objections to the order of preference. If the party-list is adopted voters must be carefully warned of the danger of cross-voting, and no doubt most people will vote only in one list. But it is no great hardship to have to do this ; most of us want to do so now.