So this is how our neighbors to the north do it.
In Canada, there are no chads, no fancy yet malfunctioning voting machines, no butterfly ballots. There is a paper ballot. There is a pencil. There is an "X" placed in front of the candidate of one's choice. Then there is manual counting. End of story - or, in this case, election.
This week, in just one day, 13 million paper ballots were counted in a Canadian election. Prime Minister Jean Chretien was declared the winner.
To explain just how the second-largest country in the world has kept its election process so simple - and for a perspective on the ever more complex goings-on in this country - The Sun spoke with Craege McQuarrie, an election official in Elliot Lake, Ontario, a town about 335 miles north of Toronto and almost 500 miles from Detroit.
McQuarrie's electoral district is Algoma-Manitoulin, and he knows it like the back of his hand. "Our area is large in land but short on population," McQuarrie says from Ontario. "We are 85,000 kilometers, about the size of New Brunswick. 'Course, that won't mean much. The number of people are about 75,000. About 52,000 are qualified to vote."
And given his diplomatic remarks about the post-balloting madness in the United States, McQuarrie might want to think about running for office himself someday.
How do people in the province vote? What are the logistics?
We had five candidates in this most recent election. We are divided into polling districts. Here, we have 181 polling districts. People go to the polling district that they live in, of course. They can vote as long as they are registered and live in the district where they are voting and are on the list. If they are not registered, they can register right there if they have proper identification.
What officials are at the district offices?
There are two polling officials there. And representatives of any of the candidates are welcome to be there. The voters are given ballots. They go behind a screen, mark their ballots and then drop them in the ballot box.
Sounds simple. How long does the voting go on?
It begins at 9:30 a.m., and the polls are closed [at] 9:30 p.m.
What happens when the voting is completed?
At 9:30, the two officials take the ballots out of the box. [They count them], then they phone the results through to me at my office.
What is the scene like at your office on election day?
We have a lot of people in here. The results start coming in around 10 p.m. We start getting a lot of calls. We put the results on a tally sheet. We keep a running tally and send it over the computer to [headquarters at] Elections Canada. They have the results from everybody and have a much clearer picture of any trends [than the U.S. networks had on Nov. 7].
About how many people are in your office to handle all of this?
We have a crew of about six people here on separate phone lines. We have runners going up and down the room carrying things. Because sometimes we have media around, we put sheets up showing the results for all of the polling places. It becomes very visual.
So when do you finish phoning in the results?
We get finished around 12.
Were there any problems during this last election or are there typically any problems?
Yes, we do have problems that arise. Such as, did the person mark the ballot in a certain spot? Is one of the marks overlapping into another spot?
Who makes the call when there is a ballot dispute?
The deputy returning officer makes the decision on which is a valid ballot and which is not. And sometimes we have trouble reconciling the number of people who voted against the number of ballots that are received and the number of people who are registered. But often that is because we are standing here with a list of registered voters and some people may have shown up and registered on the spot.
Did anything problematic arise in your polling place in this year's election?
We had a truck driver who was passing by, he was driving across Canada. He walked in here and said, "I would like to vote." But he lived three provinces away!
What is your sense of Canadians' reaction to the U.S. presidential election and its aftermath?
I think there is a little surprise about the [number] of votes the government [that is, Al Gore, as a representative of the Clinton administration] received. From various media reports, they had sort of got the feeling that maybe the government of the day would slip, wouldn't get as much as it got. That's really all I'm hearing.
