Voting made easy in Ontario.

I felt compelled to share this.

I work on a ship, which just happens to be super busy at the moment. My commanding officer approached me and asked me to do some research on voting options for our ship's crew in the Ontario provincial election, as most of them hadn't gone to the advance polls or applied for special ballots before coming back to work for a month. Given our current agenda and preparations we're all making for an upcoming remote trip, we didn't even think we'd be in a port to vote at all... which seemed like such a shame.

Unlike in federal elections, I discovered that you can't just walk in to any polling station and vote. It has to be in your home district. I called Elections Ontario to see if we had any options at all, as about 15 of our crew live in this province. I was basically told no, and I felt upset and angry that our voices would be overlooked simply because of the nature of our jobs. I don't know about my crewmates, but my voter card hadn't arrived in the mail before I left for work. The gentleman on the phone explained to me that special ballot applications generally take a couple days to process, and by the time the ballots arrived in the mail it'd probably be too late... but I decided it was worth a shot anyway.

I printed out the special ballot applications and the e-mail I received from Elections Ontario, along with an explanation for the crew, and urged them to bring me their applications and I would scan them to Elections Ontario with their ID. Only three of us bothered, because it seemed like a waste of time. I sent everything in, and in my e-mail to Elections Ontario I explained what our situation was and asked if they could please expediate the applications and courier them to our work address. Maybe, just maybe, they would have arrived in time.

We got a phone call last night from someone at Elections Ontario, who told us that someone would be driving our special ballots up to us. It's about a 4-hour round trip. We actually delayed our sailing today to wait for the ballots to arrive, and just when we had given up and prepped to depart, they showed up. We voted quickly and put everything in the proper envelopes. The crew stood around deck and waited for me to run to the mail room and back, ballots in tow, in this torturous humidity and with not a breath left when I returned. The gangway was lifted 5 minutes later.

Somehow, by the good graces of our incredible election staff, we were able to vote. What seemed like a long shot and a pretty unfortunate situation turned out to be quite a story. And I'm telling it because it's such a stark difference from what our neighbours to the south are dealing with. Voting should never, ever be out of reach. It should never be a way to shut people out and silence them. I think the employee who drove them up far exceeded expectations, but what stood out to me was that what they told my colleague on the phone was, "We just want you to be able to vote, so we're going to make sure you can." I'm blown away. We all were.

Just incredible. I'm proud of my province for this, especially as it was a tough situation. Bravo to Elections Ontario for going the extra mile... literally.