The ballots are much simpler in Canada. I remember getting a ballot that was the size of a 4' x 6' card. Put a check next to the candidate you want as the MP in your riding. Done.

The US ones can be multiple pages where you end up voting for a dozen candidates across multiple federal, state and local offices, plus a number of ballot initiatives. It's kind of nuts.

But I agree the old fashion paper and pen is the best system. It doesn't matter how theoretically secure some high-tech digital voting system is - unless every voter can understand how it works you'll always have people who think it's fixed. Actually, even with paper and pen people will think it's fixed, but you at least eliminate a ton of the unknown because of the physical record.

I mean, Canadians also have local and provincial elections and referenda, no?

Yup. But local, provincial and national elections are different events. Referendums are occasionally attached. Ballots are almost always one question for provincial and national.

The argument against this is that generally speaking, US presidential elections are considered the most important, so turnout on any election on “off” years, or even “off” days, is considered a sure way to get less voter turnout. Is this not a pattern observed in Canadian elections?

I'm not sure I follow. Assuming I have this right, there are no "off year" elections in a parliamentary system like in Canada. Elections occur when the government in power receives a vote of no confidence. In a minority government situation this could be the first session after an election. In the rare occasion that a government makes its 5 year term limit, the PM will "drop the writ" at a strategic point to queue up an election.

Municipal elections do occur on a schedule here, but I don't think that's relevant since it's hyper local.

American elections for president are every 4 years, as are most other offices.

Pretty much without fail, any election that isn't a presidential one has lower turnout if not also scheduled with the presidential one, since many Americans will only show up for the presidential elections. Which is why the ballots tend to be long.

Granted, I don't think this makes them very complicated; my ballot had plenty of offices this year, and it was essentially a one-page double sided bubble sheet, with accompanying voter guides sent in the mail. It's not very hard.

And regardless, all elections are run by a non-partisan agency. Just like the health service, the police service, the fire service, and the garbage service.

Non-partisan? I mean, they are controlled by the elected government, who appoint people to do what they want. With the exception of elected sheriff's in the US, I wouldn't say it's less partisan. Take a look at what's going on in Alberta with the new Conservative gov't. Plenty of "non-partisan" government agencies are raising hell over the new policy direction.

Why do you keep bringing this up? Do you mean that these services are centralized? Because elections are indeed run by “non-partisan” (whatever that is supposed to mean in this context) agencies here in the US, but they are not centralized at the federal level.

Nonpartisan would mean not dependent on elected officials declaring a party.

Generally speaking, in most US states the person certifying the election result is the Secretary of State, an elected official elected while affiliated to a party. There was a whole brouhaha when Brian Kemp was running for governor of Georgia while also the Secretary of State, because that looked like a conflict of interest in a hotly contested election.

The only way to get non-partisan would be elect panel to oversee the administration of an office, and let each major party with 30% or more in office have equal # of votes. Like picking teams for school sports. It'll end up 50/50. Let the speaker of the house be the deciding vote for ties.

Judges shouldn't be appointed by the fed but be randomized by computers for a database of vetted lawyers/judges who could assume the role, and all federal judges only serve for the case they're called in for (basically reverse jury duty).

I really don’t think that that’s going to be the savings you think it is. Counting votes isn’t front-loaded with a flat rate cost or subject to duplication of effort. Having a single federal elections agency isn’t going to help if you have a super complicated ballot.

There are plenty of things to vote for though, and usually it's considered a good thing to put things on the ballot in presidential years because presidential elections have the highest turnout.

My Washington ballot this year was a double-sided single page bubble sheet. I'm not sure how much easier it's supposed to get.

That and having Elections Canada run everything instead of each province rolling their own protocols.

Imagine that: a non-partisan agency, much as the police and fire services are also non-partisan.

The police are not non-partisan, at least in USA.

It's hard to imagine any worker staying non-partisan when one party is threatening their paycheck.

It's always non-partisan until it becomes partisan somewhere along the line

One of the main reasons it is taking so long is the volume of mail-in ballots is extremely high compared to prior elections. And on top of that, in several states, Republicans were adamant that vote tabulation not begin early to deal with this volume, with the entirely foreseeable result that counting took far longer than necessary.

But it still doesn’t answer the question - in Canada we count all the ballots the same day BY HAND. Why is this so hard in the US?

The only thing that I can think of is that your elections staff are grossly under-allocated?

Another possible factor is that US elections generally see far more races on the ballot. In my ballot this year, I had to vote for US President, US House, US Senate, State House, State Senate, Councillor, Register of Probate, and three referendums. That's actually a pretty light ballot; in the past, I've also had to vote for races such as County Auditor, Recorder of Deeds, County Clerk, Soil & Water Conservation District Commissioner.

It obviously takes far longer to count ballots by hand when you're dealing with a dozen races instead of one or two.

Actually most places I'm aware of count paper ballots. Germany, Sweden, Australia all use paper ballots as far as I'm aware (unless something changed recently) and in all of the countries results are typically in during the night of the election. And many of these countries have also significant option in their votes, I mean Australia's preferential system means you have a lot of choices (if not going with the party preferences).

I think one reason for the US system to be this complex is essentially corruption, i.e. funnelling money to the makers of voting machines. The other reason is that the US system highly encourages parties to try to get votes of the other party discounted based on technicalities.

It still boggles my mind that in the US, the first modern democracy the system developed to discourage voter participation

My ballot had 35 positions to vote on.

I sometimes wish we had a separate federal / state / county / town vote to keep the practice up and reduce the overhead of individual voting periods.

It isn’t unless you have valid mail in ballots that haven’t even arrived by Election Day.

17 million votes don’t take as long to count as 175 million?

Why not? Larger countries have more places voting happens and more people counting. It parallelizes almost perfectly. Slow counting is almost entirely down to resource allocation.

Right. That's this year. What about the last 20 years of US elections?

What about them?

Presumably you’re thinking of Florida in 2000, where the margin of victory was 0.0092%, and thus exceptional care in counting was merited. As far as I can recall other national elections have been timely in the last 20 years.

In most elections, the election results are clear by the time I go to bed normally.

I'd also like a citation on the Canadian counting.

There last election wasn't particularly close and from my understanding the mathematics of someone other than Trudeau + Liberal party winning were pretty much set.

Republicans wanted ballots to be tabulated up front. This is completely false. The debacle of overnight ballots showing up at the 11th hour past the closing of the polls is another reason to tabulate them as they come in.

Your population is also less than that of California alone.

Yes, and of course this should be irrelevant given that as the poster said, presumably these things scale linearly.