[Firebot]

Originally Posted by MarchHare

This is the big difference between Canada (and most other democratic nations) and the United States: in Canada, we have a sane and fair voting system. Each polling location might have somewhere around 20 ballot boxes, and each ballot box might have ~500-1000 votes. An Elections Canada employee and volunteer scrutineers from each party can reasonably count and validate the votes from each box within an hour or so. Then the numbers from each polling location are reported to elections officials and the results are shared with the media. Barring an exceptionally close election, Canadians almost always know the winner within 1-2 hours of the last polls closing on election night. And best of all, protecting the integrity of our voting system is seen as a non-partisan issue. No matter which party you support, giving everyone an opportunity to have their vote counted fairly is something all Canadians agree with*.

In the United States, thanks to Republican vote-suppression mechanisms, there might be only one or two polling locations for a city of over a million people. They purposely want to make it hard to vote. With that many people all having to cast their ballot from a single location, long lines are assured on voting day. People with jobs may not be able to get enough time off work to wait in the queue. This affects low-income citizens and minorities in the inner cities far more than it affects rural/suburban white people. Advance voting to avoid the long lines is often made available to white people in the suburbs but not Black people in urban areas. All of this is by design to disenfranchise people who are statistically less likely to vote for the GOP. It's shameful.

*With very rare exceptions like Jason Kenney possibly cheating to win the UCP leadership nomination or "Pierre Poutine" sending robocalls to convince Liberal and NDP voters that the date of the election and/or their polling location had moved to help the federal Conservatives in 2011.

I sense zero personal bias in this post