> Eh. Now I'm wondering just how standardized the ballot is, across Canada -- as seen in Florida, American elections don't have a uniform design method across the U.S. The ballot paper in Quebec was a black and white card printed on kraft paper (i.e. on a backing of brown wrapping paper). On my ballot card, the black background had white labels on the left-hand side for the candidates' names, while on the right, each party/name had a large nickel-sized white circle lined up for my 'X'. Then the right-hand side of the ballot folded over twice to cover my choice as I handed it back to the elections officer, who removed part of the ballot tag(?) and handed the card back to me so that I could put it into the ballot box.
>
> The pencil I used, incidentally, was also three inches long. Sounds about right...?
>
> It took Dave and me about ten seconds each to vote, too. The longest part was looking at the names of the candidates for the Marxist-Leninist and Marijuana Parties, who had managed to make quota in getting their names on the ticket alongside the other five major Parties. Hey, whatever happened to the good old Rhino Party?

Ah, the Rhino Party... I miss 'em too. And you gotta love the "sixth-party" types... We had a Marxist-Leninist and a Green party type, but not the Marijuana party... I feel deprived...

As for the ballots, I don't remember if mine was on kraft paper (I don't think it was), but other than that, every detail you provided sounds identical to my experience. Of course, it's not fair to compare ours directly to the US-- IIRC, they vote on other things while electing the president, such as electing judges and such (or something. Please correct me if I'm wrong.) As a result, their ballot HAS to be more complicated. With us, we're all doing the same thing-- Electing an MP. Just the names and possibly the number of choices changes... Not very hard to standardize that...

Don