What if they held an election and nobody came?
So. $300,000,000 taxpayer dollars spent.
And for what?
The lowest voter turnout since Confederation, and no practical change to the political situation.
Heck of a job, Stevie!
Labels: politics
posted by ronnie at
11:47 a.m.
5 Comments:
You don't want to know how I feel about this election. Mainly I feel like the two main cities in Saskatchewan are being screwed by the way seats are allocated in the name of "healing" the rural-urban split. Saskatoon and Regina don't vote Conservative and yet 7 of the 8 seats that "represent" us are held by Conservatives. But then maybe I'm just bitter because my candidate lost by 253 votes.
Gulp.
59.1 percent of registered voters is a record low turnout.
And (Wow, i learned something today!) yall have a universal registration system.
Brent, honey, I feel your pain. My riding, after 15 years of a wonderful, progressive, decent Liberal MP who wholeheartely supported multiculturalism and our efforts to attract and keep immigrants, is now held by a Tory. (The wonderful MP retired and didn't run again in this election so it was a wide-open race.) I'm willing to give the guy a chance, but I'm reserving judgement until I know if he buys into the Harper neocon agenda, or he's one of the Tory Good Guys trying to put the "Progressive" back into "Conservative".
NFTP, yes, registering here is easier than not registering! (For example, every year when I do my taxes there's a place on the form where I can, if I wish, give Revenue Canada permission to share only my name and address with Elections Canada to make sure they're updated on where I'm currently living.)
The other thing about voter registration in Canada is you don't identify with a party or as an independent. You just register to vote. Call me weird, but I think that having to declare my loyalties one way or another would be a deterrent to me. If forced to, I'd register as independent, and I'm surprised more Americans don't do the same.
At any rate, it was "The Seinfeld Election" , and the people don't seem inclined to have voted about nothing.
ronnie
It used to be easier for the voter to be registered. I remember as a younger man going door to door for Elections Canada registering voters as an enumerator. My partner - nominally from a different party although at that point the parties were desperate to get anyone they could - and I were assigned a polling district and we had to go to every house in that area and get the name and address and professions of voters in that household. We made two passes of that area to get everyone. I suspect that method gave a better picture of the area than the current method, but obviously the current method is undoubtedly more cost effective.
One thing I didn't like this year was the requirement for identification. I've heard a few stories about people who went to the polls but didn't have the required ID and were turned away. 39 elections without needing this and suddenly we have to prove who we are.
Based on my south of the border experiences, some concrete step is required to ensure that people do not vote more than once. Purple ink on a finger works. Some form of state issued ID also works.
We....again south of the border....have far too many people/organizations turning in fraudulent voter registration forms. In the last presidential election, apparent voter fraud may have given Wisconsin to Mr. Kerry. The split for the state was quite small. Milwaukee alone had more people vote than they supposedly had voting aged citizens. A post election investigation indicated that many people had registered to vote on the same day as the election, which is legal in Wisconsin and many of those registrations were either eligible or used fake information.
The number of suspect "same day" registrations was easily large enough to cover the supposed margin of victory.
I'm glad Canada doesn't have those kinds of issues to deal with. Requiring ID is an effective deterrent that is negligibly invasive. Better to stop such problems before they grow.
Regards,
Dann
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