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ST. JOHN’S, N.L. – Tuesday’s vote in the United States may be dominating social media feeds, but it is just one of more than 70 national elections that will have taken place this year by the end of December.

Mauritanians went to the polls in June, the same month Mexico elected its first female president and Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared victory in India. Azerbaijanis and Indonesians voted in February. Iceland goes to the polls on Nov. 30, Ghana on Dec. 7.

“This is the biggest election year in human history,” the United Nations Development Program says on its website. “Half of the world’s population — some 3.7 billion people — will have the opportunity to go to the polls in 72 countries.”

In Canada alone, four provinces held or will hold provincial elections this year: New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Nova Scotia.

For mathematician Rebecca Tyson, 2024 is a simple yet beautiful example of how periodic systems — even messy human ones — will briefly fall into step with one another.

“It’s something that looks amazing, but really, it’s just this interesting property of oscillators that every once in a while, they’ll all line up,” the University of British Columbia professor said. “It just happens. Which is pretty cool.”

Perhaps you’ve seen a video of a pendulum apparatus, where pendulums of different lengths hanging from a central rod are set swinging at different times and somehow seem to fall briefly into synch, making a coherent wave in unison. As the swinging continues, they scatter, falling back out of step.

This is an example of oscillators lining up, Tyson said in a recent interview. And this is roughly what happened with all these elections lining up in 2024.

Give or take a few early snap elections or other political upsets, elections are periodic, like a pendulum, though imperfectly so. The United States holds elections every four years. In India, general elections occur every five years. In Azerbaijan, a vote is held every seven years.

If we represent each country with a pendulum, with its length and period corresponding to the country’s election cycle, this year — 2024 — is a point at which they all swung in unison, just for a moment.

The same thing happens with planets, Tyson noted. Each takes a different amount of time to complete one full orbit around the sun. Most of the time they’re zinging around completely out of sync with one another. But sometimes, some of their trajectories can line up, she said.

For example, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus and Mars were roughly aligned near the moon in March of 2023, and they were briefly visible in a line that stretched from the horizon to roughly halfway up the night sky.

Tyson acknowledges it might seem surprising that the orbits and periods of planets and pendulums could be compared to election cycles, which are far more prone to disruption. Elections are “noisy” or imperfect oscillators, she said. “But every once in a while, even noisy oscillators line up.”

Barring noisy disruptions, it will be another 420 years before all of the countries with four, five, six and seven-year election cycles expected to vote in 2024 will all vote in the same year again, said Pouria Ramazi, an assistant math professor at Brock University. That’s because the lowest common multiple of four, five, six and seven — the smallest number that can be divided by each of the numbers — is 420, he explained.

To figure out when, for example, Azerbaijan and the United States will have an election in the same year again — barring any surprises, of course — just take the lowest common multiple of their election cycles: seven and four. In this case, it’s 28.

“That’s just a simple example of the beauty of math,” Ramazi said in an interview.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 2, 2024.

— With files from The Associated Press

HALIFAX – Tim Houston was wrapping up his election victory speech on Aug. 18, 2021, when Nova Scotia’s premier-designate repeated a pledge he had made many times during the campaign.

“For the next four years and beyond … I will promise you this: I will give you everything I have to fix health care,” he said, reaffirming the Progressive Conservatives’ singular focus on the hustings. “We can put Nova Scotia on the path to sustainability and fix our health-care system.”

Three years later, Houston has called an election for Nov. 26 knowing the contest could be a referendum on whether he has delivered on that lofty pledge.

Government data show the Tories made some progress during their first term, but fell far short of repairing a system beset by shortages of doctors and nurses, and long wait times for ambulance and emergency room services.

The province’s Need A Family Practice Registry — a key health-care indicator — was updated earlier this month for the first time since June when it reached a record 160,234 people without a family doctor or nurse practitioner.

While the latest figures pointed to a big improvement, with 145,114 people now on the registry, that number is far higher than in the spring of 2021, when there were half as many people on the list. And the latest numbers show that 16.2 per cent of Nova Scotians were still seeking a primary care provider, well above the government’s goal of five per cent, and the highest rate since the 2021-22 fiscal year.

Jennifer Benoit, provincial co-ordinator for the non-profit Nova Scotia Health Coalition, said significant gaps remain in the system, especially regarding emergency room wait times and closures.

“I think we are still in a health-care crisis,” Benoit said in an interview. “We need to have a focus that remains on fixing these things …. Since Mr. Houston has taken office, we’ve seen people dying in emergency rooms waiting for care.”

Between April 2022 and March 31, 2023, unscheduled closures of emergency rooms reached 41,923 hours, a 32 per cent increase from a year earlier, according to a government report released last December. Most of those closures were the result of a lack of staff.

Meanwhile, only 56 per cent of ambulance response times were within the government’s benchmark this year, down from 71 per cent in the summer of 2021. And 66 per cent of emergency room wait times fell within the government’s benchmark this year, up slightly from 65 per cent in the summer of 2021, but far from the province’s 90 per cent target.

While it’s true the number of doctors in the province continues to grow, the rate of climb has been outpaced by the province’s ballooning population and ongoing physician retirements and transfers. As a result, the number of doctors per 100,000 Nova Scotians has fallen from 124 in 2021 to 121 this year — again, short of the government’s goal, set at 135 doctors per 100,000 people.

As for registered nurses, Houston can boast about a three-year hiring blitz that has grown from 196 net new nurses recruited in 2021 to 692 recruited this year. Still, the vacancy rate for registered nursing jobs remains at 15.4 per cent, more than double the government’s target at seven per cent.

Meanwhile, the Liberals led by Zach Churchill have been running online ads with the tag line: “Tim Houston: All promises. No progress.”

And on Monday, the first full day of the campaign, the New Democrats held a news conference to draw attention to Houston’s “failure to address the health-care crisis.”

“Instead of fixing health care … Tim Houston is relying on quick Band-Aid solutions and pouring millions of public dollars into apps, tech deals and shady contracts,” NDP Leader Claudia Chender said in a statement.

Chender highlighted the case of Hogan Court, a half-finished hotel that the Houston government planned to transform into a health-care facility. Earlier this year, the province’s auditor general said the government failed to exercise due diligence when it invested about $46 million to buy and renovate the property.

“Meanwhile, Nova Scotians are still stuck with a patchwork of health-care options that are difficult to navigate,” Chender said.

Anticipating that kind of criticism, the Tory government spent $158,000 to distribute 480,000 pamphlets across the province earlier this month describing its latest health-care initiatives, including the province’s new YourHealthNS app andActionForHealth.ca website.

“We’ve made a lot of progress in the last three years,” Houston says in the publication. “But we can — and will — do more to get Nova Scotians the best possible health care.”

The publication boasts about the province hiring 300 doctors and specialists, as well as 2,000 nurses.

The government pamphlet also points to initiatives aimed at establishing a medical school in Cape Breton; increasing opportunities for nurse training; providing free tuition for paramedics; adding more long-term-care rooms; expanding a major hospital in Halifax; and fast-tracking accreditation for out-of-province doctors.

On the first day of the latest election campaign, Houston revealed his top reason for seeking a new mandate, but it wasn’t health care.

Instead, he said he wanted to implement a plan to improve affordability and housing. As well, he said he wanted to seek support from Nova Scotians for his ongoing battles with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“Nova Scotia needs a government with a renewed, fresh mandate to stand up for our province,” he said. “Facing a political crisis … Prime Minister Trudeau has made a decision to try and save seats in Ontario and Quebec at the expense of places like Nova Scotia.”

Ten minutes into his 17-minute speech, the premier turned his attention to health care, and he confirmed the system is far from being fixed.

“We know there’s work to be done, but we have a record to build on,” he said before citing the accomplishments listed in the recent pamphlet. “Nova Scotia finally has a plan that is working.”

Benoit, whose advocacy group is mainly supported by public sector unions, said Houston’s government deserves credit for many of the investments made in health care.

“That is a step forward,” she said. “But we have not seen the quick fix that he promised during his last election campaign.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 2, 2024.

EDMONTON – Stephen Winters says watching the U.S. election campaign from Canada as a dual citizen is like a parent watching their kid play sports.

“When you’re on the sideline it makes you more nervous than when you’re in it,” Winters said in an interview from Calgary.

“My friends and family at home are like, ‘Don’t worry that much’ because they’re there and they know things are going OK. When you’re outside, it can look worse than it is.”

Winters, from Minnesota, teaches linguistics at the University of Calgary. He is one of about 600,000 eligible voters in Canada able to cast their vote in Tuesday’s election.

Winters said he has cast his absentee ballot but has taken a step back from reading political news because of how helpless he feels afterwards.

“I voted for Kamala Harris and the Democratic representative for Congress,” he said.

“I don’t think she’s the greatest candidate but she’s definitely the best option.”

He says he chose not to vote for former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump because of his foreign policy and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“My wife is Ukrainian, and Trump’s relationship with (Russian President) Putin, whatever the heck it is, that’s really a problem.

“We have friends and family in Ukraine who are in danger because of that war and I don’t think Trump supports the Ukrainian cause.”

Dual citizen Georganne Burke said she has also submitted her absentee ballot from Toronto.

A political consultant who moved to Canada from New York State in 1987, Burke says she cast her vote for Trump because he would help the economy, and she agrees with his foreign policy.

“I was a diehard Democrat, worked very hard for the Democratic party when I lived in the United States. The party left me. I did not leave the party,” said Burke, who is also the head of the Canadian chapter of Republicans Overseas.

She rejects opposition accusations that another Trump presidency would not respect the checks and balances of democracy.

“Donald Trump is not a menace to society. Donald Trump is not Hitler. He’s not a dangerous man. He has the best interests of the United States at heart.”

Burke said watching the U.S. election from Canada has been difficult mainly because she can’t help recruit voters to Trump’s campaign in the U.S. as she did in the past working as a consultant south of the border.

“It’s hard to watch it from here (for) somebody like me who’s a complete, total political junkie. I would love to get down there and get my hands dirty and do stuff, but I can’t.”

The best she can do, she said, is ensure relatives and friends in America and Canada mark their ballots.

“We have to be sure that the United States … that their economy is healthy, that there is security there, because if things go bad for them, it’s a hop, skip and a jump to us both economically and actually physically,” she said.

Jacob Wesoky, executive vice-chair of Democrats Abroad and a 20-year-old American student at Montreal’s McGill University, said every vote counts.

“The voters in Canada could decide this election,” Wesoky said.

“I voted for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and then Democrats down the ballot.

“Everybody here is extremely invested in this election. Everybody’s watching it closely.

“A lot of people are very nervous.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 2, 2024.

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