ABSTRACT
Politicians debating the construction of electoral systems talk mainly about the matters set out in Parts One and Two of this book. But this is not more than half the story. Decisions about the qualifications of voters and candidates and about forms of voting directly affect the character of an electoral system: democracy is sometimes measured by the slogans ‘one man one vote’, ‘one vote one value’—everyone to count for one, and none for more than one. But any system, however democratic its form may be in this sense, can be twisted in operation so that it becomes something quite different. To put the same thing in another way, an electoral system comprehends much more than the formal questions so far discussed. Three further conditions must be fulfilled, each of them with wide implications. There must be an administrative system efficient enough to conduct an election without confusion, inaccuracy and bickering over trifles. There must be some means of ensuring that adjudication on the merits of cases arising under the electoral law is outside the hands of the government of the day, because there is always suspicion that the government is seeking to ‘make’ the elections in its own favour. There must be a code of political mores embodied in law and practice, which sets bounds to the bitterness of the contest for power: and such a code must have sanctions enforceable against those who break it, enforceable by the combined strength of public opinion and independent judical decision.
