The deliberation of September 6, 1466, had placed the election of the highest magistrates for ten years in the hands of electors appointed by the Council of a Hundred. The heads of the party were accustomed to decide upon the names of these electors in an extraordinary meeting, and to lay them before the said council, which usually accepted them without further scruple, since only those not unfavourable to the party, even if they did not belong to its actual partizans, sat in this council. Sometimes, however, it occurred that the candidates were not all accepted, so that anxiety arose in the minds of Lorenzo and his confidants lest electors disagreeable to them might some day be appointed, and their influence over the Signoria and other high magistrates be thus limited. This seemed serious to them. However large, too, and constantly increasing an authority might be which was independent of the responsible magistrates forming the fabric of the State, the respect for forms was equally great, and is indeed a characteristic feature of these Italian communes; and their endeavour was to give to measures which gradually destroyed the spirit of the constitution the appearance of legality. In the summer of 1470, the Signoria, which was entirely subject to the Medici, made the first attempt in this direction. They proposed to the Council of a Hundred to form out of all the electors from the year 1434 who were still living, forty in number, and five new ones, a College of Electors. From this for the next sixteen years five might be annually drawn, with power to appoint the Signori and Gonfaloniere out of the lists or ballot-boxes containing the names of the citizens capable of office. The opposition to a measure which would have placed forty-five tyrants over the people was, however, so strong that the Signoria judged it advisable to withdraw the proposal. Six months later, in January 1471, something similar was, nevertheless, carried out. Instead of leaving the electors to be appointed by the Council of a Hundred, the Signoria sitting in July and August, together with the electors acting for the current year, agreed that they should appoint the new ones, the Council of a Hundred only confirm them, and a single voice above the half of the members present should give the casting-vote, whereas a majority of two-thirds of voices had previously been requisite. The same thing happened in the following July, and when the votes were collected it naturally followed that only the names of persons considered reliable came upon the electing tickets, so that the threads of the whole administration were more than ever confined to a few hands. Immediately after Piero de’ Medici’s death, under the plausible pretext that the war occasioned by the Malatesta affair was not yet at an end, an extraordinary tax of 300,000 gold florins was levied, so that the government was provided with funds for all emergencies.