After going through two elections within just a few months, I am sure we are all happy to put that aside and move on with our lives. But if you’ll bear with me for just a few more words on the topic, I have some thoughts that have been rolling around in my head after volunteering with the federal election process this spring, for the first time in my life. 

The phrase “all politics is local” is largely attributed to an American, Tip O’Neill, although he was not the first person to say it. There are many meanings associated with the phrase, largely related to the American political system, and he even wrote a book with that title. But for me, when I hear that phrase, I think about how, on the ground, we are all affected by decisions made by our politicians and why it is so important to be engaged in our communities. 

It is discouraging to see the mountains of misinformation that appears online. For people who still use Facebook, it has become an endless stream of advertising mixed with false information, some of which is easy to spot, but it is all becoming more realistic every day. Checking sources is time-consuming and discouraging – lists of statistics may include source information at the bottom, but if you actually go as far as to look those stats up, often they have been manipulated to tell a desired story or they don’t exist at all. This type of information is designed to produce an emotional response – and it does a good job of it, dividing people and causing real harm. 

There is even a relatively new term – “rage farming” or baiting. I’m not an expert on this, but from what I understand, people deliberately post things online to incite rage, which drives more engagement with them, which leads to dollars flowing into their pockets. This may be why I have heard Facebook, now Meta, referred to as the place where the truth goes to die, especially as fact checking has gone out the window. Some online platforms have rules against spreading misinformation in this way, while others do not.  

This type of information seems to ramp up during elections. I saw it for myself over the past months during our federal and provincial elections. I admit that I did spend time chasing down stats and trying to understand why people were choosing to become so enraged by these posts that mostly were untrue, or containing a tiny grain of truth manipulated to tell a story.
One thing that I found helpful was getting out into the real world and learning how our own political system works. One of my roles was volunteering as a scrutineer for the federal election. I found it to be a very interesting process and everyone I talked to afterward felt the same. We all felt reassured by our own system, regardless of what people were sharing online. 

You may be wondering who are scrutineers and what do they do? First of all, every political party is allowed to have scrutineers at the polling stations. Every political party is allowed to have scrutineers at each polling station, of which there are 249 in my Huron-Bruce riding. I worked in Brussels, where there were multiple regular polls, advanced polls, and special polls. It was news to me that every riding has special polls that are open throughout the campaign. If you are willing to drive to the special poll, you can vote most days until the polls close on election day. I voted on a sunny Saturday morning two weeks ahead of time. These votes, however, are all counted at the same time as the regular polls. 

We did not have enough volunteers to cover all the polls, but we had someone at most locations. And I noticed that the party I was volunteering for was the only one to send scrutineers. I expect that in ridings where the vote count is closer, more parties would send scrutineers, but that is just a guess. 

After the polls close, the doors to the polling stations are locked and the paid people get to work. It starts with everyone taking out a diagram of how their station is to be set up prior to counting. Every non-essential item is removed so there is no chance of any ballots getting lost or added during the counting process.  The sealed boxes that contain the ballots remain sealed until two people are present – one who removes the ballots and the other who uses a paper to record the votes. In the provincial election, machines were used to record the votes, so that process was quite different from what I witnessed at the federal election.

As a scrutineer, I saw every ballot at my poll and was able to comment if there were any that looked questionable. While many of us were new volunteers who had never done this job before, one person who has been volunteering for decades told me there are rarely any issues. In fact, it was a low drama job that went very quickly. I expected to be there until the middle of the night and was wondering if I should bring snacks, but the counting took less than one hour. It was also a very quiet process, with just the candidates’ names echoing around the room as the person opening the ballots read them to the person recording the results. 

After all the ballots are removed from the box, they are recounted and the numbers recorded on the tally sheets checked for accuracy. There was not one questionable ballot at my poll, and the only one anyone noticed in our group was one that had not been marked at all. We agreed that it was interesting to see how the process worked and that, contrary to what you might read online, the election results seemed safe and secure. 

Volunteering in our federal election provided a lesson to me about the importance of being more engaged in our system – not just marking a ballot but also staying engaged after the election. It is up to all of us to determine what kind of country we want to live in. That requires being engaged, staying truthfully informed, and making sure our elected officials are making decisions in line with our values.  ◊