74
Case of a single vote that decided a federal election in Canada sparks uproar
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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It's interesting. I'm going to ignore for a second which political party won, etc.
Her ballot was returned by the postal service, despite how she used a preprinted address label that was sent to her.
And had her vote been counted, it would have tied the election.
I'm inclined to say that her vote wasn't cast in time, even though it wasn't her fault. I'm sure there are a lot of people who had similar things happen and don't end up having their vote counted. For example, road closures, transit cancellations, bad weather, lost mail. As long as it's not a widespread problem, you have to draw the line somewhere and say that the ballot wasn't cast in time.
I'd say the exact opposite. The vote was on April 28th, she mailed her ballot on April 5th and it was returned to her on May 2nd.
She mailed her ballot in 23 days ahead of time. That is more than enough time to ensure your vote will be counted. There's zero reason to expect your ballot to not be received and counted using the pre-printed label or for it be returned to you more than 3 weeks later.
This isn't a case of someone sending it a day or two before and standard processing taking it past a deadline.
It wasn’t cast in time because it had been wrongfully returned to her… and her vote would have created a tie.
But where do you draw the line? Because such precedents can cause ripples in the nastiest ways down the line. Just think of Al Gore in the US, and how everything could have been different had "the line" not been drawn before the recount was fully finalized, which in the end, was proving that Gore was the rightful elect?
This is an interesting case indeed.
The line has to be drawn somewhere, is the problem.
The current line is that the vote was accepted by the time that the ballots were counted, and I don't think you should move the line simply because it's a close race.
Every vote must count, no exceptions.
Once the candidate cedes the election, the total doesn't affect the race. THE CANDIDATE QUIT.
Then you cannot rely on mail in ballots because sometimes mail gets lost. Really if you want to make sure that every vote must count, no exceptions, then you have to design a new method of absentee voting.
The moment that a ballot has left the voter's possession, it needs to be tracked and kept securely like we do at my local polling place, or else there's no way to count every vote, no exceptions. So we need something extra for absentee or mail-in ballots.