Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 July 1893 — A NEW VOTING MACHINE. [ARTICLE]

A NEW VOTING MACHINE.

A machine h is been designed to carry out the present “Australian system” of voting to a degree of accuracy, secrecy and dispatch which cannot be attained without its use. It is perfectly automatic and although each voter sees and stamps his own ballot, yet no ticket is handled by anyone until the vote is counted. Those tickets are printed in one continuous roll and occupy the same form and relative position as at present. The roll Is placed in its proper position and locked into the machine.

In voting, this continuous ticket passes over a glass-covered table on to another roll placed in a ballet box. The glassscovered table is arrang?d in panels, four or more, according to the number of parties represented. At the side of each glass panel is a sliding frame wherein are placed keys similar to I hose of a type writer and so spaced in as to stamp opposite the name of each person to be vo*-ed for. At the top of this sliding frame is a larger key called the “straight ticket” key. When this key is struck by a voter all the other keys on tne board are locked, or f any other kev be struck the “straight ticket” keys are locked, thus pre venting mistakes In addition to this the. inventor has gone mrther and invente I an electrical device attached to each k >y, which automatically counts the number of votes cast for each name.

“Our elevators are bursting,” says the New York World, “with wheat for which the farmer can command but little more than 50 cents a bushel. There are in Eu'•ope alone, if we may credit the stat ment made by the late secretary of agriculture, Mr. Husk, 150,000,000 people who never eat wheaten bread. In the one country an immense suppb of visible food waiting for buyers. In the other counti are millions who go to bed hungry. Between|them ply daily ferry boats with freight charges rjduced to a minimum. What prevents a. exchange that means benefit to both sides—needed food for the one and needed market for the|oth r? “Not the sea, for it costs no more to send a bushel of wheat abroad than to send a letter in the .1 ail, but the McKinley bill, which takes from the farmer,or his middleman, one-third or . ne-half of the commodities for which he might exchange this surplus wheat iu foreign markets as a fine for not buying those commodities from some protected home producer. “F is clear, then, that whatever direct benefits may come to classes from release of taxes on the necessaries they consume or on ma* terials with which they work, the great general good to be sought in tariff revision is a healthy expansion of foreign commerce. This was the immediate result of the Walker iariff in 1846. During the twenty-five years previou. our foreign trade had not doubled. In 1822 it was $141,000,000. In 1846 it had grown to 227,000,000, an increase of but 60 per cent. “Under the low revenue tariff enacted in that year it swelled by 1860, to 8687,000.000, a growth of more than 200 per cent, iu fourteen years. More significant and instructive still was the increase in the tonnage of American shipping engaged in the foreign trade. For thirty years prior to 1 ?46 it had been nearly stationary. In that year it was only 943,307 tons, almost 40,000 less than in 1810.— By 1860 it reached 2,379,396 tons. “These figures speak volumes, but their chief encouragement is for those who produce the surplus I roducts that must have other markets besides oar own for remunerative sales “The tariff of 1846 made a vent for our surplus products bv opening a market for the things which,

and which aloim, other people hat to exchange for them. Yet this rapid expansion ot imports bro’ ; no distress to home manufacturers. On the contrary, after eleven years’ ex: erience of that tariff they assented, almost unanimously to a lurther decrease of 20 per cent. “The party of low tariff and revenue duties is not about to try a new and dangerous experiment.— It has no new f angled theory which it wishes to test upon the body politic. It has not only the suppor ; of reason but this solid justification of experience in the reform i proposes to make by purging ou: laws of the duties that smell of monopoly and rescuing the sovereign power of taxation from pris vate control.”