Growing up in Canada and other Western countries there is a tendency to think of abstract concepts like democracy as simply a given - it's just the way that government works. So much so that it even seems trite to assert that people should have the power to choose their leaders, and indeed to remove leaders when the people are no longer satisfied with how things are being run. But in so many parts of the world, the notion of an average person having the power to select their government is completely unheard of, to the point where it would be considered naive to think such a system would even be possible. 

The concept of democracy is--by all measures--a noble one, but the reality for most people in democratic countries is that we hardly grasp that it is still a system run by fallible humans and not something that is somehow handed down fully intact from a higher authority without any fault. Rather, it is far from a panacea and relies on a high degree of social trust and well-functioning institutions to actually work. When you start to drill down into what it actually means to have people pick their leaders in practice things start to get a lot messier than one may envision when learning about government and politics in school. 

To be honest, until my time volunteering as an election observer in Montenegro with the OSCE, facilitated, placed, and funded by CANADEM, even I, as someone who described himself as “political junkie” and who spent nearly a decade studying politics in university, really understood what an election looked like close up. To be sure, I have always voted since the age of 18, and the power shifts and political intrigue that resulted from elections garnered my interest. However I can’t say that I thought much about where the ballots came from, where they went after they were marked and collected, how the system of checks and balances operates to ensure the tallies and results are correct, or why the procedures are the way that they are.