The whole of these intricate provisions are founded on a patent fallacy.  Preferences are not expressed in the Hare system, as in true preferential voting, that they may be given effect to in deciding the election, but simply in order to allow the elector to say in advance to whom he would wish his vote transferred if it cannot be used for his first choice.  The elector is allowed to express his opinion about a number of candidates, certainly, but after being put to this trouble only one of his preferences is used.  And which one is used depends entirely on the vagaries of the system.  The principle of the bracket illustrates this fact; if the elector has no preference the system decides for him.  If his first choice just receives the quota the other preferences are not even looked at.  Again, of all the electors who vote for rejected candidates, those who are fortunate enough to vote for the worst (who are first excluded) have their second or third preferences given effect to, and few of their votes are wasted; but the votes of those who support the best of them (who are last excluded) are either wasted or given to their remote preferences.  In Mr. Hare’s original scheme, for instance, the votes of the last 50 candidates excluded would have been nearly all wasted, unless some hundreds of preferences were expressed.

Another claim on which great stress is laid is that by the process of transferring votes every vote counts to some one candidate.  This means nothing more than that the votes of rejected candidates are transferred to the successful candidates.  Where is the necessity for this?  So long as each party secures its just share of representation and elects its most favoured candidates, there is no advantage gained by transferring the votes.  Miss Spence even declares that “every Senator elected in this way will represent an equal number of votes, and will rightly have equal weight in the House.  According to the block system, there is often a wide disparity between the number of votes for the highest and the lowest man elected.”  Surely the mere fact of transferring votes till they are equally distributed does not make all the successful candidates equally popular!  On the contrary, it is very desirable to know which candidates are most in favour with each party.

+Ballot Papers Must be Brought Together for Counting.+—­This is a practical objection to the Hare system, which puts it out of court for large electorates.  If the whole of Victoria were constituted one electorate, as at the Federal Convention election, the transference of votes could not be commenced till all the ballot papers had come in from the remote parts of the colony, two or three weeks after the election.  On this point Professor Nanson writes:—­“In an actual election in Victoria this ‘first state of the poll’ could be arrived at with the same rapidity as was the result of the recent poll on the Commonwealth Bill.  In both cases but one fact is to be gleaned from each voting paper.  The