Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/356

304 been attended with entire success, namely, the return of their candidate to the representative assembly, with all the moral weight of the emphatic expression of esteem shown by the proffered votes of the whole constituency of 600. Still less have the second 200 voters, whose votes were appropriated to C, any reason to complain, for they also have not only elected a favourite candidate of their own, but, equally with the first 200, they are gratified by the triumphant success of A. The 99 voters for B have also the latter satisfaction, and if they have failed to return their next favourite candidate, it is simply because 101 are more than 99.

The complaint of injustice is no doubt made rather in the interest of the candidate than in that of the electors. Instead of a struggle for mastery in which 301 may overpower, set at defiance, and extinguish the voices of 299, this method of election promises that each 200 shall be free to choose the exponent of their opinions ; but it does not promise that any vote, taken singly, shall aid in the return of more than one candidate. In the supposed Danish case, the candidate might certainly complain of the ill-fortune which had brought out of the urn the voting papers of his friends in an order so wonderfully adverse to his success that, according to the computation of M. Andræ, it would not happen in one election out of some millions. If such a case had occurred under the method proposed in this treatise, B's only ground of complaint would have been that A and had offered themselves as candidates to constituencies in which they happened to be more popular than himself, and in which, unluckily for him, his only supporters also chiefly dwelt ; and the votes of these constituencies having been appropriated to A and C, that appropriation had exhausted the votes which, but for their prior possession, would have come to him, B. The law of appropriation by locality, in fact, redresses any fortuitous injustice or hardship which a resort to chance or lot may occasion, for although the circumstances supposed are obstacles to the political success of B, as every interposition of a superior or more favoured competitor must be, yet it is no fair ground of complaint.

There is no doubt that if the system of valuation of votes, according to the position of the candidates on the voting papers were adopted, as in the Frankfort proposal, Appendix B, and as in appendix C, pp. 209-302, that the result would be very different. The supposed poll would then stand thus:—