Ontario Provincial Election 2022 Jun2 02 used the Dominion Voting Imagecast Precinct tabulation machine. Photo by Don Tai
The world’s democracies hinge on elections being fair and above board. No party should be able to “steal an election”, with no vote rigging or other shenanigans. At the end of an election day, when election workers are most tired, the counting of votes is a critical final step to the final election result. The Dominion Voting Company’s Imagecast Precinct, or “tabulator” as we call it, is a vote counting machine that reads all votes throughout the election day. At the end of the election day the poll is closed and, “voila”, the election poll results are printed out on a grocery store sales slip-type of thermal printout.
Canada Election 2021 DRO kit, ballot box, ballots, lots of papers. Photo by Don Tai
In Canada’s elections, there are hundreds of polling locations. Each polling location must have one or more polls, where a Canadian citizen over the age of 18 will receive a ballot, mark their chosen political candidate on the ballot, and finally drop the ballot into the ballot box. At the end of the night after polls close, the ballots in the ballot box are counted. Results for each candidate are then phoned into the local polling office. Results are then tallied up to larger and larger geographic levels.
Successful Rob Ford Mayoral campaign: simple, effective, and grassroots
Democracy works by allowing anyone to campaign for a political position, and the person who gets the most votes, gets the position. Apart from a couple of years living in China, this is all I have known. Here in Toronto we have a new mayor who campaigned on the platform of cost and waste reduction. Roughly a third of all councilors were swept out, replaced by fresh faces and ideas. We have “polls” that predict the outcome of the election before election day. These polls are akin to taking the pulse of a patient, an indicator of events to come. Using scientific and statistical analysis one would think that these polls would be quite accurate, but in the case of Toronto’s mayorality race, the polls were very wrong, by a large margin. It turns out that the offline community, those that do not have internet access or those that spend very little time online, threw the polls off, so much so as to question the benefits of polling all together.
