spouse of scouse

Federal elections in Oz must be held at least once every 3 years, the Prime Minister chooses the date and can (and you're right, often does) choose an earlier election date.

Mordko

The cost was orders of mag higher if you count all the spending commitments. That’s OK. The budget can always balance itself and nobody gives a monkey about our monetary policy.

Paul_Shepherd

The American election system has got to be the biggest joke of all!
Bit like them holding on to the imperial system, when no one else in the world uses it anymore!

scrubbedexpat091

Well technically the US has federal elections every 2 years, House Of Representatives only have 2 year terms.

Jerseygirl

yes indeedy

Danny B

Last week I foolishly signed up to help count the votes in Kamloops, I thought it would be one of those rare things to do in your life, same as Jury service.

How wrong was I, what an antiquated manual system we have here in Canada. I wont bore you with the details, but coming from someone who works in IT and loves to automate repetitive tasks, why on earth have we not gone digital with voting yet?

I get the security about voting from home, but why on earth can't we drive to the polling station, and digitally enter our vote there? The counting of the votes would then take seconds, instead of hours and hours....

scrubbedexpat091

Unfortunately at the time the US was founded there was great distrust with the UK, so the founders make it incredibly difficult for change, sometimes I think the founders make it a little too difficult to change things.

US tried to go metric, when I was a kid they were pushing it hard in school because we were all going to be metric by 1990 if you believed teachers.

Probably a good thing since I failed metric hard in school, not that I did well in math, but metric was for some reason difficult for me, probably because I sucked at math.

dbd33

What about the UK? Brexit Benefit and all that.

scrubbedexpat091

Have you seen the chaos voting machines cause south of the border?

CBC actually ran article that a couple weeks ago, boils down to Elections Canada takes a cautious and incremental approach to technology, paper is reliable, and apparently industry has not created an electronic system that meets whatever criteria Elections Canada requires.

scrubbedexpat091

Unfortunate for the one Liberal MP who made that comment about Taliban, appears she lost and will be about 3 weeks shy of 6 years needed to get the pension.

Danny B

If the CBSA has the technology for those Automated Border Clearance Self-Serve Kiosks at major airports, I'm sure elections Canada can do the same thing for voting. It's craziness counting every single vote by hand. We made plenty of mistakes last night as time went on and we got tired

Almost Canadian

Not necessarily. There was no vote of no confidence this time, just an opportunistic attempt that failed.

Paul_Shepherd

Well I would hope people voted for Brexit for more significant reasons other than retaining the awkward imperial system... the biggest problem for me is the converting back and fourth all the time.... which can be the cause of errors... The Gimli gider... where the Air Canada Boeing 767 ran out of fuel mid flight was caused by a conversion error between metric and imperial! pertty scary... but sometimes a very easy mistake to make.

I wasn't very good a math at school either, but when I started doing my job I got much better at it, and metric makes it a lot easier.... no fractions or odd numbers! and all units if measure are interchangeable.... particuarly volume and weight.. which makes life so much easier... I rarely work in metric now though, some of the drawings I now produce look like something for the Titanic with all the fractional dimensions!

Partially discharged

Some posters on this forum still insist on it Are you Nigel Farage in disguise.

scrubbedexpat091

Voting machines already exist in the world, so not like its some new tech either, but who knows what election Canada requires to meet their requirements, they were a little vague on that part in the article.