I know, I’ve posted this case before, so I apologize in advance for flogging a moribund horse.
In EVERY election, thousands of ballots are tossed out for one reason or another. The difference is, MOST of the time, elections aren’t close enough for those ballots to make much difference, so nobody raises a fuss about them.
My favorite example? In 1988, the absentee ballots in TExas were screwed up- NOT buterfly ballots, something even stranger: the ballots made it APPEAR that voters could select Texan George Bush for president AND Texan Lloyd Bentsen for vice president, even though they were from different parties! Not surprisingly, thousands of elderly Texans and Texans in the armed forces went ahead and voted for Bush and Bentsen. As a result, thousands of votes were tossed out as invalid.
Again, the 1988 vote wasn’t close- Bush won by such a wide margin, nobody bothered to complain about that mixup.
IF the 1988 election had been close, and IF Bush were trailing by a few thousand votes in Texas… you suppose Bush might’ve insisted that such votes be counted in his favor? THink DUkakis would have fought against that?
grienspace, I think Elections Canada did have pretty much all the votes counted within four hours. The polls closed between 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. (CST) across the country (earlier in the Atlantic provinces, later in B.C. and Yukon).
By the time I went to bed around midnight CST, the TV broadcasts were indicating that the results in various ridings were based on all polls in a riding reporting (mainly for the eastern ones), or the large majority of polls (e.g. -“97 polls out of 103 reporting”) (mainly for B.C.). Sure, not all 12 million or so had been counted, but it was pretty close.
(Note that the Canadian networks took a very conservative approach to declaring winners in individual ridings, and the government overall. With the grim example of the double flubs by the US networks in mind, they did not use exit polls when deciding to call a result - they used the preliminary vote numbers from the polling clerks in each riding.)
Well, you Canadian guys ought to be concerned, 'cause I have it on very reliable innuendo that when Dubya is inaugurated his first Executive Order will be the invasion and annexation of Canada!
All except Quebec. You keep Quebec.
You have been warned!
(If you’ve heard Dubya speak Spanish, you know you dont want the hear him talk French.)
Wonder what would happen if the next Quebec secession vote came down to this narrow a margin? Might our logical and reasoned neighbors to the north be having a bit of a food fight?
Face it, America had an incredibly close election, which is being settled in a loud, confusing and constitutional way. No one’s being shot or imprisoned over it.
And as for the vaunted Canadian election efficiency - look who you ended up with. Your candidates’ debate wound up on TV here and it was hilarious - I watched part of it under the impression that it was an SCTV rerun.
Actually, the latest Quebec referendum on the future of Quebec was decided by less than 1% of the vote. But we hand count up here, and get definitive results in a matter of hours. I don’t even recall the losing side asking for a recount.
Okay, you thought one Canada’s election debates no was funny did you? I’m curious, just what did you find so funny?
By the way, Jackmannii, when you respond to a post, you should read it clearly. DSYoungEsq clearly states he is American, not Canadian.
I didn’t realize that I had to earn my vote. I was under the impression that the Constitution guaranteed it, and that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 said I didn’t have to do anything special to exercise that right.
What other ways, besides military service, can one “earn” the right to vote? By paying a poll tax? By passing a literacy test? By listening to Rush Limbaugh?
Really, please let me know, because I want to vote in 2004. I don’t want to waste any time “earning” my right to vote.
Since I selected for quotation the one line of DYoung’s response that makes it clear he’s not a Canadian, I am obviously well aware of that fact. Both Canadian smugness and its sympathizers on this side of the border are fair game.
As to the prime minister candidates’ debates, could you really listen to that bunch of preening, babbling losers without breaking down laughing? They made the average U.S. school board meeting look intelligent.
And have any meaningful Canadian elections lately come down to as tight a vote count as the one in Florida? The Quebec secessionists would probably be hurling eclairs and shouting “Aux barricades!” if there were only a couple of hundred votes separating them from their cherished rump state.
USA Today reported following the election that all Canadian votes were counted within four hours of poll closings. I’ll look for the citation; the number quoted by jti as to total votes sounds correct; the trouble with these numbers is we hear so damn many of them. (sigh)
As for the continued bashing of Canada over who they elected, I would submit that neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Gore is somehow a superior candidate for ruling a country than Mr. Chretien. Nor does this have anything to do with whether or not the WAY they ran their election was efficient. Face it, it was.
Now, we might point out that WHAT and HOW Canada was counting had something to do with that. After all, Canada isn’t counting 12 million votes to see who got a majority of that number. It counts the votes in each riding to see which proposed MP got the majority of those votes. And it isn’t in need of a sophisticated ballot, because it isn’t voting on multiple issues; there is only one thing on which to vote.
But one of the troubles consistently caused by debate of the issues resulting from this election is the tendency of people to support their contentions with irrelevant issues, not to mention ad hominem argument, such as we have seen here.
It’s worth mentioning to anyone smugly pointing out the difference in counting time that Canadians were voting for only ONE office. Each ballot had only ONE vote on it. Most ridings, I’m sure, were decided by a larger margin than whatever error was associated with the various methods used, none of which inherently took all that long to count anyway. Even hand ballots could be quickly sorted into one pile or the other, and counted by thumbing the piles. Do I have that right?
A US ballot had most, or all, of these things on it, ALL of which had to be counted by the same harried people:
President/VP, Senator, Congressperson, Governor, state cabinet offices (half a dozen typically), county commissioners (up to 5 or so), other county offices (half a dozen, typically), various regional commission officers (another half a dozen), mayor, city council members (half a dozen there too), other city officers (varies widely), school board members (half a dozen), and up to several dozen state and local referendum questions. Did I leave anything out?
Also, there had to be virtually zero real “undervotes” for MP in Canada, right? Anyone who showed up must have wanted to cast a vote, except for maybe a few cranks making a protest statement nobody was listening to. That made it easy to pick out apparent no-vote ballots and figure it out.
ElvisL1ves and DSYoungEsq, I certainly agree with you that our vote counters had an easier time of it - one office only, and on a riding-by-riding basis, not a province-wide basis.
But that brings up a question I’ve wondered about for a while now: why do you have so many offices up for election on the same day? what’s the connection between municipalities, state and federal elections? don’t the different campaigns get blurred, as you try to remember what’s going on at each level?
(BTW, this is not a “Canada’s different, so it must be better” question - I’m genuinely puzzled, and seeking to eradicate my personal ignorance.)
Oh, and about undervotes - we do get some spoiled ballots - sometimes people have trouble making an “X,” sometime they vote for more than one candidate, sometimes they leave it blank, and sometimes they write rude things on the ballot about the candidates. I remember talking to one person a few elections back who believes strongly in the sanctity of democracy, but didn’t like any of the candidates. He conscientiously took the trouble to go to the polling booth, get a ballot, and cast it blank, purely as a protest.
We do it all at once simply for convenience and cost. Dates of Presidential elections are set by the US Constitution, and all other elective offices are for fixed numbers of years, so it’s just easier that way. Even elections that don’t include Presidential races are still on that particular Tuesday in November. Primary elections, where each party’s candidates for various offices are chosen, can be anywhere from February to September, but traditionally always on a Tuesday.
If we scattered election dates throughout the year, it would be so inconvenient and expensive that the pressure to do them all at once anyway would be intense.
You do have a point about not being able to pay full attention to every campaign for every office. It may be part of the reason so many people are so alienated from the process that they don’t vote at all, who knows? That’s counteracted to some degree by having the campaign season go on for what seems like forever, rather than just a month or two.