Wednesday June 9, 2010

The Canadian election system is not my cup of tea. I simply don't like the fact that most of the votes in an election are thrown away: your candidate did not win, then your vote has no impact anymore. I grew up in a country that uses a popular voting system. It isn't perfect. Far from that, but at least your vote is represented in parliament since if a party gets 10% of the votes, it gets 10% of the seats.

But you can imagine that this also leads to many parties, although the reality is that only about 2-3 parties get more than 20% of the votes each. And there were many parties. Here is the proof:

That is a total of 18 parties with a total of about 650 candidates while parliament only has 150 seats.

Yes, that is choice although it wasn't that difficult for me to make a decision:

The procedure for voting in a foreign country was far from easy. First you had to request a form that they would send to you. Fortunately I was registered in the last elections, so I was able to skip that step. Then I had to send in this form by mail. They informed me I was registered and once the voting forms were ready, they were sent to you. As you can see, I got the forms however, for unknown reasons, I received them very late. Late because these forms had to be returned by mail again and the receiver needed to have these votes in their possession by 3 PM today. A complicated procedure while I voted through the internet in the last elections...

PS Funny to see 9 of the world wide trending topics on twitter are related to these elections.

# posted @ 6/09/2010 05:48:00 PM 0 comments