Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/236

 each of the remaining candidates on the unappropriated voting papers, and take out, one by one, those who had the smallest number, until none but the required number of favourite, and therefore selected, candidates should remain.

The term "elimination" may be used to describe the method by which the excluded candidates are withdrawn. If no more than a hundred are to be chosen out of a thousand, however the process be conducted, nine hundred must be eliminated. Whether we begin at the least popular names and proceed upwards, cancelling the names until the hundred only are left, or begin by electing the highest on the poll, and descend until the hundred shall be chosen, and the remaining nine hundred excluded, the result, if the name at the head of every voting paper be alone regarded, will be the same; but if the principle of contingent voting, the only method yet suggested for preventing uncertainty of action and an incalculable waste of the electoral power, be adopted, and the cancellation of each name be followed by giving the vote immediately to the next name on the voting paper, the result may be very different. It is convenient, therefore, to distinguish these methods by describing the upward process as one of elimination, and the downward process as one of selection. The result of discussion as well as of the experience gained in the tentative application of this system of voting, in the United States, and gathered also from the operation of the cumulative vote in this country, has led the author to return, with little variation, to the method of eliminating the candidates having the smallest number of votes, suggested in his earlier publications on this subject, notwithstanding the greater apparent complexity which had induced him to omit it in the later editions of the treatise. It is, however, desirable that each process should be stated and considered, the better