Canadians take pride in simple, speedy election

A poll worker checks New Democratic Party leader Alexa McDonough's enumeration card as she arrives to vote in Halifax, Nova Scotia on Monday

TORONTO, Canada (Reuters) -- As lawyers in Florida bickered over the presidential election, Canadians voted with pencil and paper on Monday, marking an "X" against the name of a candidate, with their printed ballots then counted by hand.

And, as many smug-looking Canadians were quick to point out, the results of Canada's "no-tech" federal election came in quickly and accurately even as the seemingly never-ending electoral story south of the border dragged on.

By Tuesday morning, Canadians already knew everything they needed to about the next government, the next prime minister and the composition of the next Parliament.

That's a contrast to the situation in the United States, where lawyers are still wrangling about the outcome of the November 7 presidential poll with a few hundred votes separating the two contenders in the crucial state of Florida.

Lawyers are having a field day challenging the way votes are counted, the ballot paper in a key Florida county, and what to do about dimpled or pregnant chads -- pieces of paper that did not completely separate from the punch-card ballot forms, distorting the results from counting machines.

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"There were minor glitches in terms of the electronic voter lists, but we like to claim that Canada has a superior system," said Paul Thomas, a political scientist at the University of Manitoba.

"We count the votes on the basis of 301 constituencies, so it becomes easier to break the task down into small, manageable pieces, and it seems to be a more efficient way to do it."

The results, announced just hours after the last polling station closed, handed a hefty victory to veteran Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who called the election ahead of time to capitalize on a strong showing in opinion polls.

Chretien's Liberal Party boosted the number of seats it holds in Parliament after a divisive, back-biting campaign and won another five years in power.

Thomas noted that Canada, which inherited its constituency-based, first-past-the-post voting system from Britain, had not followed the United States in using machines to count votes, or even to vote in Parliament.

"Our system has some advantages," he said. "If there are errors they tend to be modest in scale."

But in some ways the system was also less fair, allowing candidates to win even if they do not receive an overall majority of votes and weighting constituencies to give small, lightly populated regions a bigger share of seats.

David Rudd, director of the Canadian Institute for Strategic Studies, agreed the Canadian system worked well as far as the count was concerned.

But he said one could not condemn the U.S. electoral system on the basis of the unprecedented events in Florida, where Texas governor George W. Bush appears to have won a few hundred more votes that Vice President Al Gore.

"They took pieces of paper and then counted them, they did not punch out chads," Rudd said. "But I do not think there is any inherent superiority in our system. The U.S. system usually seems to work just fine, this time it's just a bit bizarre."

Noting that the wrangling in the United States had depressed already-low interest in Canada's vote, he added glumly: "Even Mexico is more exciting than we are. I suppose that is what you get when you are a country that is at peace with itself and with its neighbors."

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