Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1889-12-31
ANOTHER LEADING JOURNAL FOR
BALLOT REFORM.

Recent elections in America have shown that
we have been Boosting oYermuch OF our republic
can institutions and representative govern
ments. As long as we are unable to devise any
means for faithfully recording the Will of the
people, we have not established among us repre-
sentative government. When votes can be
traded in ike corn and wheat, when officers of
the election are bought as slaves were bought
under the old dispensation, we do not have a
republican government. but plutocracy.
So speaks the C6wier-Jomnal, a leading
representative Democratic paper, and more
authoritatively than any other speaks for
the Democracy of the Middle States, if not
of the whole country. We look upon it as
a very promising sign, one that gives strong
heart to hope that very many of the great
opponents of public opinion, such as the
journal quoted, the New York Tribune, the
Chicago Inter Ocean, the New York World,
the Albany Journal, the Cincinnati Com
merciaI Gazette the Philadelphia Record,
all partisan papers and representing the
two great parties of the nation, are apostles
of reform and advocates of fair play in
methods of ascertaining the will of the
people. All of these papers and scores of
others are warmly pressing the claims for
consideration of the reform ballot system.
The Ga,t,.ier- La1I.~.4IL ~
Kentucky, and admits its theoretical vir-
tues. But it finds that IN practice it is not
the protection against perversion of the
popular will that it is supposed to be, and
that in fact it may be made the means of
utterly classifying the will of the majority.
1t then proceeds to prove that under the
present system in Kentucky, officers of
election have been and still are purchased
to falsify the votes of electors, even when
their names are recorded on the poll book.
Our contemporary comes down at last to
consideration of the reform system, under
which no ballots except those furnished by
the State can be deposited, and it gives in
its adhesion to the new system as prefera-
bic to anything that has preceded it. Its
summing upof the reasons for this declara-
ton are, that the ballot is rendered alb
solutely secret; that the voter is removed
from the liability of intimidation; that it
deprives the purchaser of any assurance
that the goods bought are delivered; that
it protects the ballot-box from false ballots,
or what is generally termed, from ballot
box stufiing.
While it is not disposed to exaggerate
the benefits to flow from mere mechanical
contrivances, and while it believes fraud
will exist under the system, it is convinced
that it will immensely reduce the oppor-
tunity for it, and that hence it commends
itself ito all who are trying to free Ameri-
can institutions from the faint of fraud and
corruption
Kentucky is presently to have new
Constitution, and the CouTer-Journal
sounds the note of demand that in it there
shall be given liberty to depart from the
present and set up new mode of voting.
1t declares that the Wallace law, applying
only to the City of Louisville, and which
is step in the direction of the reform bal
lot system, though greatly defective, has
proved in two years of trial that a secret
ballot can be secured, and that with all its
imDerfections the new system is immensely
better than the old one. The great Ken
lucky paper does not hesitate, therefore, to
range its influence on the side of the re-
form movement.