Canton Weekly Register

ANOTHER STATE'S EXPERIENCE.
There is great diversity of opinion in Massachusetts as to whether a primary election law providing that voters of all parties shall at the same time and at the same polling places cast their ballots, though in separate ballot boxes, has worked well or has been found a failure.
Twenty-two cities last year voted to adopt the law—known as "the Luce joint-caucus act."
This year 10 of the cities—including Lynn and Worcester—voted it out again.
The principal reasons for rejection, given by representative citizens in signed statements published in the Boston Globe, are the expense entailed upon the public treasury, and continued participation in the making of the majority party's tickets by voters who in the subsequent election support opposition candidates.
In Lynn, for example, it appears that nearly all the voters attending the city primaries declared themselves Republicans and cast ballots for their preferences among the candidates for Republican nominations.
The Republican primary vote greatly exceeded the Republican vote in the following election. The Democratic primary vote, on the other hand, was only 350, while the candidates on the ticket which these 350 nominated each received on election day from 3,000 to 5,000 votes.
Against the voter who declares himself a member of one party and supports the ticket of another, there can not well be framed a primary election law to give complete protection. The secrecy of the election ballot is a bar to positive disproof of his pretensions. But at worst the primary election gives him no greater opportunity than is afforded by the primitive caucus. It is something, surely, to make the "floater" confine his primary voting to one day, one place and one ballot.