It put the Returning Officers on annual salaries of £25, and declared that Returning Officers were to be paid the amounts stated in the legislation, ‘and no other’.
William gave himself a salary of £100 on top of the £500 he got as Sheriff.
The 1858 Act created, therefore, almost certainly the world’s first salaried electoral officials, by which I mean people who were paid an annual amount specifically to perform electoral tasks. The position of Returning Officer was not full-time, and £25 not a large amount—Attorney-General Hanson, for example, earned £1000 for annum. Keeping expenses down was, after all, the Act’s chief raison d’être.
Posted 20 September 2016 by Peter. Comments are closed on this post, but you can trackback.