2015 Federal Election

[ookpik]

One way in which advanced polling differs from the process on the day of the election is that they transcribe your name and address onto a separate list, and you are asked to sign next to the information.

That's what the media reported and what I suggested could be computerized, not the actual balloting itself that others have criticized above.

Presumably the list from which voters' names and addresses are transcribed is in some computer database already. So it's already subject to security breaches, hackers, etc. All I was suggesting is that rather than transcribe that stuff manually, which incidentally opens it up to all sorts of transcription errors, it would be a lot simpler (and faster!) to print that stuff off the database onto a registration form, then ask each voter to sign their form.

It seemed odd to me, too, that they waited until a voter returned from the box to process the next voter. It was strange for others ahead of me, too, who assumed that they would show their ID while the previous voter was voting, but were asked to wait.

This could also be due to a lack of proper education of the polling station staff.

P.S. I never understood the point of collecting all those entry cards we have to fill in on flights that enter Canada. There must be 10s of millions of them every year. Once you've been allowed to enter Canada what's the point of keeping them? Does someone in Ottawa actually read them?      At least now you have the option of scanning them with some basic OCR validation and data collection. If that became universal it might actually provide some useful statistical data.