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EDITORIAL
Secrecy of the Ballot
The decision of the majority of the Supreme Court in
McMahon
i> Attorney-General
is unlikely to please
active politicians who will doubtless contend that it
will henceforth facilitate personation. The majority of
the Court, in construing the words contained in Article
16 (1) (4) of the Constitution, "voting shall be by secret
ballot", held that this entailed absolute secrecy, and
not the limited secrecy that had prevailed up to now.
This limited secrecy consisted of the fact that the mark-
ing of the voter's number on the counterfoil already
bears the number of the voter's ballot paper, and thus
makes it possible at least theoretically to trace the
voter's ballot paper and thus to discover how he has
cast his vote. Mr. Justice McLoughlin may well he right
when he states that this was a happening which, in the
light of experience and of reason, cannot ever happen.
Yet, at the same time, the majority of the Court stressed
that it was essential that the manner in which the voter
cast his votes should not he disclosed to anyone, and
that the authorities should not have even a remote
possibility of checking how a particular vote was cast.
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2 E
Head Office: Harcourt St., Dublin 2.
141