Majorities and pluralities.
Counting the Votes.—When the polls are closed the ballots are counted by the officials of the polling place in accordance with whatever plan is used. With ordinary ballots the counting does not take very long; if preferential ballots are used, or if a system of proportional representation is in vogue, the counting takes a good deal longer. When a candidate receives more than one-half of all the polled votes, he is declared to have a majority; when he merely obtains more votes than the next highest candidate he is said to have a plurality. In the United States, at nearly all elections, a plurality is sufficient. When the counting is finished the result is certified to the proper higher officials. A recount can usually be had at the demand of any candidate, and recounts often take place when the result is close.
Types of corruption.
Corrupt Practices at Elections.—All elections afford some opportunity for corrupt practices and various safeguards are provided against their occurrence. Personation is the offence of voting under a name which is not your own. Voters who have died since the lists were compiled, or who are absent, are sometimes impersonated by men who have no right to vote at all. Vigilance on the part of the election officers helps to prevent personation although the officials can hardly be expected to know everyone who comes to the polls. Repeating is the offence of voting twice at the same election. To do this a voter must first, by fraudulent means, become enrolled as a voter in two or more precincts or districts. Ballot-box stuffing is the practice of putting in the box ballots which have no right to be there. With the Australian ballot the practice is very infrequent. Ballot-switching is the placing of marks on the ballots, surreptitiously, while the ballots are being counted. A dishonest official, with a small piece of lead under his fingernail, has sometimes been able to spoil or to “switch” ballots by marking additional crosses on them during the process of counting. Intimidation is the offence of influencing a voter’s action by threats or wrongful pressure. Bribery, of course, is self-explanatory. All these practices involve moral turpitude and are forbidden under severe penalties. They have now become relatively uncommon at American elections.[[49]]
Absent Voting.—It frequently happens, in the nature of things, that many voters cannot conveniently be in their home districts on election day. Soldiers and sailors, commercial travelers, railway conductors, engineers and trainmen, fishermen, students in universities are obvious examples. It has been estimated that in Massachusetts the number of voters who are necessarily absent from their homes on election day averages about thirty thousand. Many others, in order to cast their ballots, are put to considerable expense and inconvenience. Now it has seemed desirable, in many of the states, to make some provision whereby those voters may cast their ballots without being actually at the polls on election day. The usual arrangement is that a voter who expects to be absent on election day must apply, some time before the election date, to a designated official for a ballot. This ballot is then marked by the voter and sealed in an envelope. The envelope is attested before a notary public and deposited with an election official who sees that it is counted when other ballots are counted. In some states the blank ballot is sent by mail to absent voters who request it, and after being marked the ballot is returned by mail before the election day. The chief objection to absent voting is that it gives an opportunity for fraud, but in practice this has not proved to be a serious objection.
Compulsory Voting.—Compulsory voting does not exist anywhere in the United States at the present time although it has been frequently proposed. Voting has been made compulsory, however, with legal penalties for failure to vote, in several foreign countries, notably in Belgium, in Spain, and in New Zealand. The usual procedure is to impose a fine upon every voter who, without good excuse, stays away from the polls on election day, or, for repeated absences, to strike his name off the voters’ list altogether.
The arguments for compulsory voting.
Compulsory voting rests upon the argument that, in a democracy, the right to vote imposes a duty to vote. The citizen must serve on a jury in time of peace and in the army during war whether he likes these forms of public service or not. Why, then, should he be allowed to shirk his duty to vote, a duty which must be performed if democratic government is to survive? If one voter has the right to stay away from the polls, every other voter has the same right. And if all followed this policy, we could not maintain a “representative” form of government. But there is another side to the question. The voter who goes to the polls because he will be fined if he stays away will not cast his ballot with much discrimination, intelligence, or patriotism. |Are they valid?| Would the votes of such men be worth counting? Would they contribute anything to the cause of good government? Moreover, it has been demonstrated by foreign experience that while you can compel a voter to go to the polls and drop a ballot in the box you cannot compel him to mark his ballot properly, for he marks it in secret. In one of the Swiss cities some years ago it was found that the chief result of compulsory voting was to induce many hundreds of reluctant voters to drop blank ballots in the box. It can well be argued that voting is a duty, but it is a duty which ought to be performed from motives of patriotism and not from dread of the penalties. Most citizens do not require compulsion and it is questionable whether forcing others to vote would, in the long run, serve any useful purpose.
The merits and defects of voting machines.
Voting by Machine.—In some cities of the United States the experiment of permitting the voter to record his choice by means of a voting machine has been tried with varying degrees of success. A voting machine is constructed upon much the same principles as a cash register. The keys bear the names of the various candidates and the voter merely steps behind a curtain where he presses one key after another just as he would mark crosses on a printed ballot. The mechanism is so arranged that a voter cannot press two keys which register for the same office. The voting machine plan has some distinct advantages in that it does away entirely with the trouble and expense of printing ballots; it eliminates spoiled ballots, it precludes all chance of tampering with the votes, and it ensures an accurate count. On the other hand the machines are expensive both to install and to maintain, particularly when several machines are needed for each polling place. Moreover, like all other complicated mechanisms, they get out of order, and when they do this on election day it makes a bad mess of things. It is doubtful whether they will ever supplant the printed ballot plan of voting.