A satirical pitch for Canada to run U.S. midterm elections, citing chronic problems like redistricting battles and dark money. The speaker proposes concrete fixes: ban open carry near polls, make Election Day a holiday, cap campaign spending, limit campaigns to 51 days, and create an independent redistricting commission.
Chapters
Hey Americans, listen, you guys are having your midterms later this year, right? Already it's a mess. Redistricting and voting laws and dark money. Here's an idea: we run it. Canada! We'll run your midterms. This is not as crazy as you might think. We're part of the world's largest regional security organization, 57 participating nations. We've sent observers to every one of your general and midterm elections since 2002. Our own deployment agency, CANADAM, has sent thousands of observers to over 150 missions worldwide, including Azerbaijan and Moldova. We've looked after failed nation-states before. We've been training in Mozambique, we can handle Nebraska. The difference is that until now, Canada has just observed quietly. This time, give it all to us! We lead the mission, we have the matching lanyards already, and this shouldn't be a new concept to you either. The Carter Center has led observation missions in Panama, Nicaragua, and Haiti, and your government, under both parties, has invaded countries and set up your own elections. So what would this look like? Canadian officials would first deploy to swing districts in Arizona and Georgia and, uh, Pennsylvania. Open carry banned within 500 meters of any polling polling station. We'd make Election Day a federal holiday so your boss can't make you work through it. Campaign spending caps. Candidates get X dollars, that's it. A hedge fund won't be able to buy a Senate seat. Our election cycles run, at most, 51 days. No more years of cable news panels. No way, this is a landslide! And we bring back letting people have water in the lineups. Hell, you can even have our federal redistricting process. For one, it's not in the politicians' hands at all. Here, maps are redrawn by an independent nonpartisan commission after every other census, mostly made up of legislative clerks and judges. By the way, we don't elect our judges here. The politicians can comment, but they can't override the result. But it's what you wouldn't get, America, more than what we can offer. Under Canadian management, there'd be no more candidates going on television to call the other side horrible names before the ballots were even counted. No county clerks being harassed at their homes. Nothing rigged. Not that we wouldn't want to, it's just we're not really capable of that level of coordination. Coordination. It took us 30 years to declare that one of our national sports was hockey. The most dramatic you'd get from us would be a press conference with a Canadian official saying that certain aspects of the process raised questions that merit reflection. So yeah, pass us the puck, America. You guys have been playing without a ref for far too long.
