420 COMPARATIVE LAW 



Therefore it was enacted that nobody should enjoy more than three 

 votes, no matter how many titles he might have to claim supplement- 

 ary votes. In that way is plural suffrage at the same time a wisely 

 conservative and a truly democratic institution conservative, 

 because it strengthens the influence of the more balanced, the more 

 useful, and the more respectable elements of society in any country; 

 democratic, since the moderation of its requirements allows to any 

 man who loves foresight and economy to acquire at a comparatively 

 early period of his life the fullness of the voting power recognized 

 to any one in the community. 



The next reform introduced into the Belgian organization of suf- 

 frage, quite recently, in 1899-1900, is a little more intricate: it is 

 the proportional representation of parties, and even more accurately 

 speaking, of the majority and of the principal minorities of the 

 body politic. 



It combines two principles, generally admitted by the legal theory 

 of most countries, but which we find carried out in Belgium as 

 nowhere else in a systematic way, mathematically and with the 

 strictest accuracy. 



The first of these principles is the absolute equivalence of the 

 voting power of the citizens, subject of course to the differences of 

 the plural suffrage, but irrespective of the size and population of the 

 parliamentary constituencies in which the citizens exercise their 

 right, or better, their political function of suffrage. 



To this end the system combines uninominal voting with list 

 voting (scrutinde liste) the adoption of the latter being necessary for 

 the working out of a proportional distribution of the seats amongst 

 three or four parties in such a way that a voter may actually vote 

 for one seat only, no matter whether his constituency elects twenty 

 members or only three or four. It is therefore strictly true to say 

 that in Belgium an individual voter, plural or otherwise, has just 

 as much influence, and no more, at the polls as any other voter, 

 plural or otherwise, notwithstanding that the one may belong to a 

 large constituency of perhaps one million inhabitants and the other 

 one to a small one of scarcely one hundred thousand. 



The second principle is the adequate representation of all the 

 important sections of public opinion, no longer according to the 

 somewhat rough methods of the majority or of the plurality rule, 

 but in accordance with the nicely balanced system of proportional 

 representation, which guarantees to the leading parties on both 

 sides the possession of a number of seats strictly proportionate to the 

 number of votes which each party can poll. 



To that end, the returning officers in each constituency first 

 make up for each list of candidates the grand total of the votes 

 which it has received. Such sum is called the party's electoral figure. 



