> On the other hand, let's see how things go if England has an election that's only a few hundred votes apart. It won't be any different. Even if there are no legal challenges (ha!) you'll still have to recount and wait for absentee ballots, and the smallest of voting irregularities will become front page news and meet with all kinds of heated protest.

(Treading softly because I know it's a touchy subject.)

I can't speak for England, but I can say I was quite pleased with how irregularities in the Canadian election have been handled. Let me give a few examples.

One riding in Quebec had a difference of about 50 votes. There are about 30,000 (very rough estimate) votes cast in each riding, on average. That riding was recounted manually (which makes sense, since the original count is done manually), and after the recount, a different candidate won (by about 7 votes). I imagine more recounts will be done, but it's not a huge deal... Of course, if that one seat was going to decide whether or not the Liberals had a majority government or who the government would be, I think we would hear a lot more about it...

Another example: Somewhere in the Maritimes, an angry man stormed into a polling station, grabbed the ballot box, and took it and threw it off a dock. He was arrested, and the returning officer for that polling station was able to use the voters list to contact the people who had already voted and had them come back in and vote again... I have heard nothing further on the story, although when it was reported the day after the election, nobody had complained about the procedure.

Overall, I must admit that our election was not very close in the grand scheme of things, and that certainly contributes to the calmness of it. Still, we do have frequent irregularities on a smaller scale (at the riding level), and these do not seem to promote any problems. I think, though, that despite the examples I have presented here, I would have to say that Sam is right-- if the election (at a national level) had been close, we probably would have been no better off than our American counterparts.

Boy, I wish I could figure these things out in my head... Having to type out an entire argument just to figure out the errors in my reasoning is a real pain sometimes. :-)

D"Bad at reasoning things through"on