Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/238

 name on all the voting papers, which perhaps for the most part remain with the local returning officers, it was in the first edition of this work proposed to diminish the labour of computation, by including in it none but the unappropriated voting papers after the first part of the election had been completed—namely, only the 664,474 remaining votes in the stage of the particular election now supposed. This, however, would be inequitable to the extent in which it gave an undue weight to the unappropriated over the appropriated voting papers. If, for example, one of the unappropriated voting papers should have upon it thirty uncancelled names, and it be referred to and counted thirty times on the computation which is to determine what candidates are to be excluded, it has obviously a far greater force than any appropriated paper, which, on the return of the candidate nominated upon it,—although there might have been fifty names below,—had been immediately allotted as one of the quota of the elected member, and thereafter referred to no more.

3. Every computation of actual and contingent votes which gives them an equal value, or which, in other words, permits a vote that may be in the middle or at the bottom of a list of thirty, forty, or fifty names, to have the same numerical weight in the election or rejection of a candidate that is given to the vote which the same elector has placed at the head of his voting paper, is radically inconsistent with the principle which it is the design of this system to embody,—that of giving to no vote more than a single voice, and that this voice should be the expression of the highest and most deliberate preference of the elector. The name which is placed first on every paper is that of the candidate for whom the elector votes. The subsequent names, however they may, for a contingent purpose, express relative preferences, are not to be regarded so long as a prior name remains uncancelled, and is capable of being chosen. If, therefore, the same weight be given to the name which is, say, the tenth, on the