Election Petition Trials in England.
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ELECTION PETITION TRIALS IN ENGLAND. BY EDWARD PORRITT. No parliamentary inquiry in recent years can have had a greater personal interest for English lawyers, solicitors as well as barris ters, than that in the present session concern ing the trial of parliamentary election peti tions. The inquiry has its value also for students of constitutional history; for to them the determining of contested elections forms one of the most interesting chapters in the history of the House of Commons, and in that of our English parliamentary franchises. As is of course well known, English elec tion petition cases, since 1868, have been tried before judges of the High Court, with out juries, who hold their inquiries in the constituencies concerned. After an election, a defeated candidate who is dissatisfied with the result, and conceives that it has been obtained by means which contravene the Corrupt Practice Act, files a petition in the courts. In the meantime the member returned by the sheriff or the mayor takes his seat in the House of Commons, and sits there until the petition has been adjudicated upon. The judges report to the speaker. When their decision vacates a seat, a new writ is moved for in the House by the whip of the political party to which the unseated mem ber belongs. In the United States, when a seat in Congress is contested, the costs attending the hearing of the case by a com mittee of the House are defrayed by the government. In England, except so far as the judges' salaries and the expenses of the Public Prosecutor are concerned, the govern ment is at no expense. Costs follow the suit, as in ordinary trials in the law courts. In most cases costs are exceedingly heavy. Barristers appear for the petitioner and the respondent; solicitors and inquiry agents of the detective class are kept busy for months
with the preliminaries; numerous witnesses are examined, and the trials are often very protracted. It is chiefly the cost of the trials, and the length of some recent peti tion cases, which have given rise to the present parliamentary inquiry. Successive elections since the Reform Act of 1867 have seen a marked diminution in the number of election petitions. There was, of course, some falling off in the num ber after the first Reform of the House of Commons in 1832. But it was not so great as might have been expected; for, sweep ing as the Reform Act was considered sixty years ago, it permitted scores of miserably small boroughs to escape. These continued to send members to the House of Commons, and although the act of 1832 had set up a uniform ten-pound franchise, most of them were really little less corrupt than in the two centuries between the reign of James I and that of William IV. During that period the parliamentary elections in the boroughs were controlled by self-elected corporations; by freemen; by the burgage holders; and in some places by the old-fashioned forty-shil ling freeholders. After 1832 the electoral corruption and squalor which had so long characterized these municipalities became more widely extended as the number of voters slightly increased. The Act of 1867, which set up household suffrage in the boroughs and enfranchised the working classes living in them, tended in a measure to diminish bribery and corruption, out of which election petitions mostly spring. But for some years after the Reform of 1867, the judges on the rota for election cases usually had their hands full for months after a general election; and there was from 1832 to 1884 seldom a period when several bor oughs were not undergoing punishment for
