ONTREAL - It wasn't intended, but Canada's smooth-running electoral system Monday seemed a rebuke to the voting chaos south of the border.
''Remember Florida,'' Prime Minister Jean Chretien joked as he and his wife, Aline, voted in his hometown of Shawinigan, Quebec.
No recounts were needed yesterday in North America's other great national race. Chretien's Liberal Party won handily, and the results streamed from polling places to television screens Monday night as smoothly as Canadian maple syrup onto pancakes. Citizens could turn in before midnight knowing who had won where.
The ballots cast by Chretien and other Quebecers were physically identical to those cast in megacities like Montreal, rural towns in Saskatchewan, or remote Inuit villages in the frozen wilds of Nunavut Territory. Only the names of candidates differed from riding to riding, as political districts are called.
''Federal law requires the same size ballot, of the same material, with the same size lettering, and the exact same font,'' said Pierre Blain, spokesman for Elections Canada, the agency that oversees Canadian voting. ''We've had a strict uniform balloting system for 80 years. It works.''
There are 301 election districts in Canada and 57,555 individual polling stations. To ensure that voters are not delayed, and that counts can be completed quickly, the maximum number of people registered to vote at any one station is 500. Canada has 20.3 million eligible voters, and about 63 percent went to the polls Monday. The government cost of running the election was estimated at $138 million.
On all ballots, voters mark the box for their candidate in pencil; all ballots are counted by hand. Members of all parties officially entered in each race are present to witness the count, along with federal watchers. Then the results are called in to a central office and entered into a computer.
By tradition, Canadian media refrain from reporting exit polls. But official results flowed so smoothly and accurately that as polling places closed from region to region, starting in Newfoundland and progressing west to British Columbia, television broadcasters and wire services were able to give precise counts from most districts within minutes.
There were some glitches, of course: a stolen ballot box was dumped in a lagoon in Nova Scotia (the ballots were ruined, voters had to be summoned to vote again, and the ballot box thief was arrested); names were unaccountably missing from voter-registration lists in a few urban districts; and several dozen polling stations opened 90 minutes late, for unclear reasons.
But by about 11 p.m. Eastern time, with polling stations closed across the country, the most obvious national voting trends were clear, with hard numbers instead of estimates available to anyone - although results in some close-fought districts would not be finally tabulated until yesterday.
''Canadians are rather notoriously fond of Florida, our `11th province,''' said Evelyn Seguin, a political volunteer in Quebec. ''But our election motto this year was, `No Floridas in Canada!' Canadians don't want to have to go to court to find out who our leaders are.''
