Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/239

 voting paper of A, as is given to the name which is first on the voting paper of B, positive injustice is done by disregarding the will of B, to a far greater degree than the will of A can be said to be obeyed. The very moderate or faint appreciation of one is balanced against the highest expression of the preference of the other. To moderate this consequence it was first suggested that the value of every vote, for the purpose of determining the order of elimination, should be computed by its position on the voting paper. The computation would be very laborious, but that being a merely mechanical difficulty, would be overcome. A more serious objection is, that it is open to the vicious operation already referred to, of enabling numbers to obtain, by organization, an undue preponderance.

4. The method proposed in the last edition of this work was that of selection. It has been supposed that there are at this stage of the election, 664,474 unappropriated votes, and 1,500 unchosen candidates, which, if the votes were equally divided, would afford 442 for every candidate. They would be very unequally divided. Some names would probably not appear at the head of any of the voting papers, and some at the head of very few, and it will follow that some candidates will have many more than 442 votes. By merely sorting the voting papers, and placing together all those which have at their head the name of the same candidate, the number of actual votes for every candidate might be readily counted. The same process would be followed as to the candidate having the next greatest number, and so on, until the remaining 354 members had been thus selected. This method was recommended by its greater simplicity, and its tendency, therefore, to remove the objection that the proposed system of election was too complicated for its purpose. It is, however, in one important respect eminently defective. The result is that all the voting papers which have been appropriated to so many of the supposed 1,500 candidates as come after the 354, that by the