=The Short Ballot.=—Throughout the United States the number of elective offices steadily increased during the nineteenth century. The result was that ballots gradually became longer until in some cases the voters found themselves confronted with sheets of paper containing a hundred names or even more. It proved exceedingly difficult to use proper discrimination among so many names and hence there arose an agitation for simplifying the ballot by reducing the number of positions to be filled by election. In a democratic government all officials who have authority to decide questions of general policy—the President, senators, representatives, governors, assemblymen, mayors, councilors, and the like—ought to be chosen by popular vote. But there are many other officials, such as state auditors, county clerks, and superintendents of schools, whose duties are chiefly administrative. These officials carry out a policy which is laid down for them by law, and it is contended that they should not be elected but appointed. If all such officials were made appointive, the size of the ballot would be considerably reduced, and the voters could concentrate their attention upon a smaller number of names. A ballot is not an effective instrument of popular government unless it is simple enough for the average voter to use intelligently. When a ballot is so long, so complicated, and so unwieldy that the voter is tempted by sheer exhaustion into voting a straight party ticket, then the party leaders, and not the people, are really choosing the officers of government. The movement for a “short ballot” aims to make government more truly democratic, not less so. [Sidenote: Defects of the ordinary ballot.] =The Preferential Ballot.=—Another defect of the ordinary ballot is that it allows the voter to indicate only a single choice for each office. If there are five candidates for the office of mayor, let us say, the voter may mark his ballot for one of them only. He is not permitted to indicate who would be his second choice, or his third choice among the five. Whichever candidate gets the largest number of first choices among the voters is the winner, although he may be the choice of a small minority. To prevent this likelihood of election by a minority when there are several candidates in the field for a single office a system of “preferential voting” is sometimes used. [Sidenote: How the preferential system works.]