Getting voting right

It’s reassuringly simple and consistent.

Maybe it’s in a high school gym, or at a community centre. You look for the black X on the yellow background, and if you’re a morning person, just wait for the doors to be unlocked.

After that, Elections Canada or your provincial elections agency makes voting just about as simple as it can be.

Civic elections, even with mail-in or online ballots, carry the same level of voter trust.

Even if you’re not registered, the registration process doesn’t mean you’ll be left without a vote; most times, it takes only a few minutes to go through the process.

If you are registered, it’s as simple as taking the registration card to the staff at your clearly identified polling station, get the old-fashioned black and white ballot and head behind the cardboard screen to the land of the stubby pencils to make your selection. Push the ballot through the slot in the ballot box and you’re done, often in 10 minutes or so. Even candidates’ signs are kept at bay, with rules about how close to polling stations they can be.

Elections Canada isn’t “adjusting” polling stations to make it more difficult for people in one part of a region to vote; it isn’t dropping legions of people from the voting rolls to favour one part of the population over another.

We’re lucky.

It’s only a handful of days to the next United States presidential election, and nothing about that electoral system seems as easy and, well, trustworthy as our own.

Already, in advance polls alone, there are huge differences in the amount of time it takes to vote, with some areas seeing lineups lasting as long as 11 hours, a delay that can dissuade voters. Some states have restricted the number of polling drop-off locations, making it harder for people in some areas to cast their ballots.

There are questions about the security of electronic voting machines, and senior politicians (Donald Trump among them) are openly attacking the validity of mail-in ballots.

Still others point to issues that have drastically slowed the delivery of mail ballots to voters, and issues have arisen about whether the U.S. Postal Service will return the ballots in a timely way.

Then, there’s fears of voter intimidation. Trump, trailing in the polls right now, has called for an “army” of poll watchers on election day, and Donald Trump Jr. has gone further, calling in a video for “every able-bodied man (and) woman to join ‘Army for Trump’s’ election security operation.”

It’s a sobering situation for a democracy. In Canada? Raise your stubby pencil. Mark your smudgy black X.

And be glad that we live in a country where casting a vote is safe, simple, and, above all, trustworthy.