Casting a voteGetty Images/iStockphoto
In an age of social media, the blunt law banning the sharing of election results before polls have closed elsewhere is simply unenforceable, and ought to be revised.
The idea behind the decades-old law is to preserve "informational equality among voters" in a vast country with 4.5 hours separating the time zones. In other words, don't give Western voters the advantage - or disadvantage - of having their minds affected by knowledge about how Atlantic Canadians voted.
Phone calls were once the main tools to flout the law. A blogger who published Atlantic Canada results was fined in 2000, in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. But today, anyone can be an instantaneous publisher. And that power has led Elections Canada to issue bulletins like the following:
"Results disseminated to an individual's friends through Facebook's e-mail service would not be considered public transmission. However, results posted to a Facebook user's wall may be considered public transmission, including cases where the user's Facebook profile is public."
Even if Elections Canada doesn't creep our profiles - and it says it won't - the sanctions threaten to make any political gossipmonger into an offender.
The law and edicts like the one above also ignore an ironclad rule of the online world: Tell Internet users that they are not allowed to do something, and they will go out of their way to do it. The result? A torrent of early returns - not all of them trustworthy, because news organizations are expected to adhere to the law - will be published online anyway.
One solution is staggered voting hours. Polls in Atlantic Canada close at 8:30 p.m.; Ontario and Quebec close at 9:30 p.m., while those in B.C. and the Yukon close at 7 p.m. The difference in closing times may need to be widened.
A second idea would be to delay the vote count in some ridings, as is effectively done with votes cast in advance polls in all ridings. It would make for cranky and tired election workers and party scrutineers in the east, as they are forced to wait till near midnight for Western votes to come in. But it would mean everyone would hear the results at the same time.
There's a third option. Although the electoral system makes some votes count less than others, and although results from the East could change the mind of strategic voters in the West, the ban could be lifted entirely - and trust invested in all voters.