Canadian Elections II

Some of you may have read my recent post about the upcoming Canadian Elections. At the fear of sounding bloody repetitive, I'll say only that in the post I articulate a very brief and general argument about why I'm thinking of NOT voting in the upcoming elections.

After this post, I went to a lovely dinner at my friend Tracey's place and she urged me to express my opinion, one she clearly didn't share, with the group. This basically led to a fairly heated debate about the importance of voting in a liberal democracy, one I won't get into here.

In any case, a few days after the debate, my friend Lindsey forwarded an Elections Canada online job application to a few of us, urging us to sign up and come see who actually votes on election day. I bit, and next thing you know I'm a Deputy Returning Officer in my Ottawa Centre riding. This basically means that I need to supervise an election site on election day for 14 hours, making sure everything goes smoothly and then overseeing the ballot count at the end of the evening. I have a three hour training session tomorrow morning, and then presumably I get to be an elections manager.

Not bad for someone who might not even vote. But what I will do is write about my training experience and then my experience being a DRO for all of you. Think of me as a correspondent gone to cover the inner-workings and corruptions of the liberal-capitalist elections system in Canada.

Stay tuned!