(b) If the district tickets are not united, all these vote fragments are immediately transferred to the Reich ticket. Here, too, are assigned the vote fragments that remain after the operation provided in the above provision.
(c) The ticket for the Reich receives a member for every 60,000 votes thereon. Beyond that every fraction in excess of 30,000 is considered equal to 60,000. But the ticket for the Reich can never obtain more seats than the total won by the district tickets whose excess fractions have been united therein; for here, too, the design is to avoid the possibility that small groups may secure more seats by means of the ticket of the Reich than they have received by direct votes in the districts themselves.
The distribution of seats among the candidates of the same ticket is, because of the system which excludes “splitting” and the joining of tickets, extremely simple. Those elected are designated according to the order in which their names appear on the tickets, so that the wish of the electors has no part in this matter.
V.—THE ACTUAL WORKING OF THE LAW.
The electoral system which we have described was applied for the first time in the elections to the first Reichstag of the German Republic on June 6, 1920. From the purely technical point of view it seems to have worked satisfactorily. It is interesting above all to inquire how the two principal innovations in these elections have worked out: woman suffrage and the automatic distribution of seats.
I.—Women already voted in January, 1919, at the elections for the National Assembly. They voted in considerable numbers. Of the women eligible to vote 83 per cent did so. The percentage among the men was 82.4, which is approximately the same as the women. But this equality disappears when we consider the proportion according to the ages of those voting. Among the male electors twenty years old only 59.6 per cent voted; whereas among the women of the same age 80.5 per cent voted. Thus the young women seemed twice as zealous to use the new privileges that had been accorded to both. Of the electors from twenty-one to twenty-five years old, 70 per cent of the men and 80.9 per cent of the women voted. But the statistics change when we come to the older groups. Past the age of twenty-five it was 84.8 per cent of men that voted, and only 82.6 per cent of women.
At the elections of June, 1921, fewer women seemed to have voted than the year before, and this time it was the men who proportionally voted in larger numbers.
But in 1920 there was tried an experiment in several districts which had not been done in 1919. The men and women of these districts voted in separate polling places, in order to determine their respective strength in the various parties. We will cite, among other facts, two instances obtained in cities of differing political complexion.
In Cologne 119,263 men and 110,364 women voted in the sections in which this experiment was carried out. The vote was distributed as follows: