Different Methods Of Voting

Purposes of voting

Political issues can be settled by expressing opinion eithei peacefully or with violence. Voting has been described as a means ol deciding political disputes and questions without violence. It is better tc count heads than to break them. But if voting is to achieve this purpose, i must be free and independent. It means that the voter should be free from al sorts of fears or pressures at the time of voting. Two methods of voting hav< been devised to ensure free and independent voting; public voting anc secret voting or vote by ballot.

Public v. Secret Voting.

Freedom from intimidation and pressure at the time of voting is essential if voter is to express his choice freely and independently. It means that voting should be secret. But secret voting is recently put into use. In the past centuries, the voter expressed his choice openly and orally in the public. It is called Open Vote or Public Voting. In Secret Voting, the voter casts his vote secretly by means of a ballot-paper and in a polling-booth which is screened off from public gaze. As he comes to cast his vote, the voter is given a ballot paper. He goes in the polling booth and marks the ballot paper according to his choice candidate. He then folds the paper and puts it into a ballot box. When all voters have voted among two or more the box is opened and votes counted.

Merits and Demerits of Public and Secret Voting.

Theoretically, public voting is advocated on several grounds. Voting is a public responsibility and, therefore, its exercise should also be public. “The duty of voting,” said J.S. Mill, like any other public duty, should be performed under the eye and criticism of the public.” Montesquieu defended public voting on 4he ground that it would enable the ignorant voters to be guided and instructed by intelligent ones in their choice. The German author, Treitschke, condemned secret voting as unreasonable and immoral. The voter shirks his public duty to express his choice openly, while the slinks up to the ballot-box and slips his paper in. It is, he remarks, a shabbiest trick done in the name of freedom.

Nevertheless, practical experience has shown that public voting leads to many abuses. It exposes voters to all sorts of intimidations and pressures by the government, political parties, employers, the landlords and other interested people. Secret voting, on the other hand, protects them from molestation and coercion. In some cases the people may be so much intimidated that they cannot really be designated as voters at all. Hence in all countries today, public voting has been replaced by secret voting. England and the U.S.A. gave up public voting and introduced vote by ballot in 18/0, Denmark in 1901, Prusai in 1920, the U.S.S.R. in 1933, and so on.

Plural Voting.

Universal suffrage is criticised by many on the grounds that it does not discriminate between wisdom and folly, intelligence and ignorance, education and illiteracy, property and poverty. Mill remarked that the principle of “one man, one vote” was wrong as it allowed “ignorance to be entitled to as much political power as knowledge.’ In order to remedy these defects two methods are proposed and employed in some countries, viz., plural voting and weighted voting. In plural voting (also called differential voting) some persons are given more than one vote on such grounds as education or property or some other qualification? It is said that they should have more votes than those who are less qualified and have fewer interests at stake. When a person has plural votes, he casts them as many times as his votes.

Weighted Voting.

It is a particular form of plural voting. Weighted voting means that the vote person is weighted on account of education, property or some other qualification. Thus his votes are weighted as against the single vote of the ordinary voter. The example of the weighted voting was found in the Belgian Constitution before 1921, according to which every male citizen of 25 years of age, and holding a public office or a lawyer had two votes. No one, however, could have more than three votes in all. Plural or weighted voting in Belgium was, however, abolished in 1921, for this system favoured the peasants, the clergy, public officials and professional classes, as against the workers and the uneducated masses.

Merits.

The underlying principle of the plural or weighted voting is that the votes of the citizens, as Treitschke said, should not be counted but “weighed,” according to their worth or value as determined by their qualifications or interests at stake in the State. The vote of an educated person has a higher value than that of an ignorant man, and therefore should be weighted against the latter. “It recognises that some men are wiser and better fitted to choose and that some men’s opinions count far more than others in ascertaining the general will.”

Demerits.

Plural or weighted voting has now been condemned everywhere as undemocratic and unjust, inasmuch as it discriminates between the rich and the poor. It fills the legislature with the representatives of richer classes. It wrongly presumes that educated persons alone can be good citizens. The chief difficulty in this system is the absence of any standard of judgment. It favours only one class of the educated people, that is, those from academic institutions. There is no criterion of superiority to say that the vote of a citizen is better or wiser than that of another. The educational test becomes arbitrary. Lastly, it opens the door to party intrigues and corruption, and satisfies no one.

 

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