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 Who was this forgotten man, Henry Samuel Chapman?
H.S.
Chapman was a British barrister who devised the
system of a ‘secure’ vote – numbered books of
government ballot papers listing all candidates.
Electoral officials were required to list each
voter’s electoral roll number on both paper and
stub, before handing it to him to cast his vote in a
private booth. They were only put together again in
an election challenge.
 According to Henry Chapman’s
descendant, the New Zealand senior lecturer in law,
Henry Spiller, his ancestor was a true son of that
great age of British enterprise, and advancing
democracy, the nineteenth century. He wrote:
“Born the son of an English civil servant, at 15
years old he was obliged by the straitened
circumstances of his family to become a clerk in a
bank. In 1823 his employer sent him to Quebec where
he established his own merchant business. Later, in
Montreal, he founded the first daily newspaper in
British North America in support of the French
radical cause.
 “On returning to England in 1835, he
wrote extensively in local journals in support of
the philosophical radical movement
, inspired by the brilliant legal and social
reformer, Jeremy Bentham who argued for a universal
right to vote and for education to extend the
ability of all to be capable of exercising that
right intelligently.
After entering the Middle Temple in
1837 he was called to the British bar in 1840.
Although moderately successful, his late start and
lack of capital meant he could not support his
growing family. An interest in New Zealand (he
edited the New Zealand Journal from 1840-3) led to
appointment as a judge in Wellington, where he
helped to frame the Rules of Court. He moved on to
the better-paid post of Colonial Secretary of
Tasmania in 1852. Suspended from office after six
months because he would not oppose the
anti-transportation movement, he departed to
practice at the Victorian bar in 1854. 
As Henry Chapman later recalled he
‘had not a day, scarcely an hour to wait for
practice. A steady stream of briefs came in. His
opinion was sought on all sides.’”
Chapman’s immediate success was enhanced when, in
February 1855, he gained the acquittal in the trial
by jury of the American black, Joseph, the first of
thirteen men charged with high treason over the
notorious Eureka Stockade affair.
  In December, 1955 Chapman, now a
member of the Legislative Council, was plunged into
a new crisis when the pressure of Chartist migrants
and the Melbourne Argus led to the
Legislative Council approving, by 33 votes to 25,
that the election of the first Victorian Parliament
be held by secret ballot. But its leader, Nicholson,
had not the faintest idea of how it would work. As
historian Professor Ernest Scott recorded: “One is
struck by the extreme crudity of the ideas of both
the supporters and the opponents of the ballot at
the time (Historical Magazine November.8 No.1
1920).”
After several months of stalemate in
the Legislative Council debate, Professor Scott
related how Chapman resolved the crisis by inventing
his ‘secure vote system’. “When William Nicholson
first proposed his ballot motion, he had but the
crudest conception as to how to give effect to what
he desired…He had not thought out the matter nor,
there is reason to believe, was he capable of doing
so. It was, therefore, fortunate that a well-trained
lawyer came to the rescue in the person of Henry
Samuel Chapman. He is the real author of the
Australian ballot – not, indeed, the man who had
commenced the agitation for it, nor the man who had
carried a motion in favour of it in the Legislature,
but the man who took the crude idea and worked out a
scheme in the form of practicable clauses.” The
Parliament opened triumphantly in September 1856.
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"That the electoral system is open to
manipulation is beyond question
... Fraudulent enrolment is almost impossible to prevent."
(NSW Electoral Commissioners, Messrs R.
Cundy and Ian Dickson, NSW Government
Inquiry 1989) |
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