PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 511
Now I come to the second change which the Select Committee has made. The House will remember that there was in the original Bill a clause which was numbered 35. The object of that clause was this. The clause intended to seperate proceedings with regard to nomination from proceedings with regard to actual election. As hon. Members will remember, an election proceeding falls into two divisions. The first is the stage of nomination and the second is the stage of election. Under the law as it existed the provision was this that there was no finality to the proceedings with regard to nomination. There may be objections to nominations and yet the election could continue to its final course and it is only when an election petition was filed for challenging the result of the election that it was open to any party who was a party to the election to raise the question before the Election Tribuanal that the nomination paper of a particular candidate was wrongly admitted or that the nomination paper of a particular candidate was wrongly rejected. Then if the Election Tribunal came to the conclusion that either of the two grounds was well-founded it was open to the Election Tribunal to set aside the whole of the election. It has been felt by many persons who are interested in politics that, that was not a very fair thing, to have the whole of the election gone through with the enormous amount of expenditure which various candidates would incur and then to be ultimately faced with this solitary single issue whether the nomination paper was properly admitted or rejected and then the whole election to be set aside. It has been felt that it was a very wrong thing and that it was desirable to sever the nomination proceedings from the election proceedings and that the election should proceed after the nomination proceedings have been finalised and made conclusive so that no such issue could be raised before the Election Tribunal when the election was challenged. I personally felt that that point of view was a very good and a very sound one and that if it was possible we should treat the nomination issue as a preliminary issue, as civil lawyers call it and have it disposed of completely and finally, so that we could then proceed to real election and the challenge to the real election could be limited only either to corrupt practice or to illegal practice or to intimidation and cases of that sort in which the election was neither fair nor free.