200,000 Cheaters

Nowhere else is such an overwhelming majority of voters passionately resolved to stuff the ballot box as in the Saar. This smoke-smudged cockpit of coal and ore, priceless in wartime, is a prize worth cheating for. On Jan. 13, 1935 Saarlanders who are over 20 years old and were Saarlanders on June 28, 1919 will vote to decide whether the Saar shall remain under League of Nations rule, unite with France or reunite with Germany. Last week the League's long-suffering Commissioner for the Saar, His Excellency Geoffrey Knox, totaled up the number of Saarlanders who had registered to vote and snapped with British disdain: "A most obvious and patent fraud!"

Experts had placed the largest possible total of bona fide registrants at somewhat under 300,000. But Saar wives have been blithely registering under both their married and maiden names and, if married more than once, under every other name they ever had. Saarlanders of both sexes have been registering in every district of the Saar in which they ever lived. To all of them--pro-Nazi, anti-Nazi, pro-French or pro-League--the present seems no time to stickle.

Instead of 300,000 registrants, Commissioner Knox found last week that he had on his hands 520,000. Under the plebiscite program, less than two weeks remained in which League supervisors could attempt to check the lists and weed out perhaps 200,000 frauds. Calling this time limit hopeless, testy Briton Knox prepared to ask the League for an extension of the checking period, hinted that it may be necessary to postpone the plebiscite itself.

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