Mail In Ballots
I am writing this before polling starts anywhere, so I am going to make another doomed prediction: mail-in ballots are going to be such a headache. I wonder whether we will even know the results of this election for days because of mail-in ballots.
I am most concerned about mail-in ballots because they are not specific to a riding, and thus will not list the candidates running in that riding. Instead, the elector will have to write in the first and last names of their preferred candidate.
As I have mentioned many times before, the conceit of first-past-the-post is that we supposedly vote for a local representative, not for a party or a party leader. This is a crock, and mail-in ballots will illustrate this. How many people know the name of their "preferred candidate"? Moreover, how many people can spell that candidate's name properly? What happens if a voter misspells a name? Zubi is not difficult to spell, but Beisan is. Mike is a familiar name in this country, but Morrice is easily misspelled as Morris. Further, is it Mike or Michael? Are either okay?
Those PPC voters are going to have a great time spelling Boskovic. Let's hope that Mary Thorn will be accepted as a candidate spelling for Mary Henein Thorn. And that is just the major party candidates in Kitchener Centre! Depending on how picky Elections Canada is going to be about misspellings, this could be catastrophic.
I took a quick look of the Elections Canada website and I do not see much information about how picky they will be. They do say that if you put in a party name instead of a candidate name the ballot will not be counted (which will itself invalidate a bunch of ballots) but I do not see information about misspellings.