VOTING BY PROXY

Whatever else they are the bosses of the Vare machine in Philadelphia are certainly frank about their methods. One of these gentlemen, referring to the remarkable coincidence that in a score of voting districts not a vote was counted for Wilson, Vare's opponent, has issued the following statement for publication: "I told the boys that they must not turn in any zeros this trip. They didn't follow orders and now there's explaining to be done."

It is apparently a custom in Philadelphia not only to discover that ballots cast for an opponent of the machine are invalid or have been discreetly mislaid in the counting, but to cast votes freely for those who have for some reason or other been unable to come to the polls at all. A Dartmouth undergraduate coming down to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving lamented that he had not been able to get down before to vote for Wilson, only to discover that he had voted for Vare after all. Cases of this sort are multiplying as the investigation of the Committee of Seventy continues.

It is difficult to understand how the Vare machine has gotten away with so much graft regularly for many years and remained unexposed. City machines in themselves are not necessarily bad. Tammany Hall is, on the whole, a good example of the efficient, reasonably clean type. The Vare machine on the other hand, appears to be the most flagrantly vicious in the country. One wonders what the Committee of Seventy in supposedly civic reform league organized several decades ago, has been doing all this time to justify its existence.