Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/240

 latest distribution have acquired the comparative majorities, are wholly thrown away and ineffectual,—howerer many subsequent and contingent votes there may be on such voting papers, below the unsuccessful candidate named at the head of each paper. One great purpose of the electoral system of a self-governing nation is to elicit from the voter, and encourage him to put forward, all the resources of his thought and knowledge in the choice of legislators in whom he has the most perfect confidence; and it is of essential importance that he should not be deterred from doing this by any apprehension that owing to the obscurity or the unpopularity of the candidate whom individually he knows and would trust, his vote would be lost if he ventured to place the name of such candidate at the head of his paper. This method of selecting the remaining candidates according to their comparative majorities, regarding only the names at the head of the voting papers, notwithstanding its simplicity, has therefore been abandoned.

5. The method which it has been resolved to pursue, as combining greater advantages than any other, is to reduce the number of candidates remaining at this stage of the election, by taking out the names of all those who have the smallest number of actual votes,—that is, who are named at the head of the smallest number of voting papers, and appropriating each vote to the candidate standing next in order on each paper, until only so many candidates are left as shall be sufficient to fill the House.

The process may be embodied in the following law:—