It’s been an ugly and nasty election but there’s one beautiful thing you’ll get do at the end: vote.

Apart from participating in the democratic process, on Monday, many of the 27.4 million electors in Canada, the ones who choose to vote anyway, will get to see the inside of buildings they may pass by all the time but never have occasion to visit.

Schools, church basements, halls, community centres, condo party rooms, seniors’ residences, university buildings, hockey arenas, hotel meeting rooms and even an art gallery are some of the locations where polling stations have been set up. Elections marshal the public-private spaces in our communities in the name of democracy. A friend even got to do the advance vote in the coach house of an old mansion while another voted in a Moose Lodge. It’s like Doors Open weekend, but with added purpose.

Elections Canada says they visit more than 30,000 locations when scouting for the 20,000 polling stations they’ll set up, looking for places that are familiar and close to where people live. They also say most are wheelchair accessible and meet at least 15 criteria including level entrances, voting areas on the same floor as the entrance, doors that easily open, good lighting and wide pathways.

My favourite places to vote are local schools, places I rarely get to visit but see every day. The gymnasiums and hallways used to seem so big when I attended but now, they feel small and narrow. The old familiar smells are there too: the faint odour of gym equipment and forgotten lunches mouldering in lockers. For those of us old enough to remember, the aroma of cigarette smoke around the staff rooms is gone though.

I try to linger as much as I can to read the bulletin boards, look at the student art on the walls and check out the trophy cases. Each school is a community within the bigger community and each has a culture and history of its own.

The glimpses of these interiors on election day are too short, but that speed shouldn’t be taken for granted. Rarely do we have to wait more than a few minutes to vote in Canada. It’s quick and efficient and we have no reason to doubt the integrity of the process, all of which is not the case everywhere. Long lines, Byzantine election rules and voter suppression are common around the world. Still, sometimes I wish it took a just little longer, even a few minutes, so I can take in more of the scene.

That scene also includes the cross section of people elections bring out. We bump into folks who might not go to the same restaurants, attend the same sporting and cultural events or have kids in the same school. Election workers are always a pleasure too, in my experience, people taking this most interesting of temporary jobs. All 300,000 of them are spread over 338 ridings at the federal level, and they aren’t allowed to wear clothing in the colour of any of the major parties on election day.

Those workers will set up 105,140 ballot boxes across the country and have 257,000 pencils at the ready, around 45 kilometres if they were laid end to end, according to Elections Canada. Thirty-five million ballots will be printed too. It would be nice if more of them were used and made this massive effort really worth it.

The scrutineers from each party who watch the process unfold are great to see as well. Different politics, but all neighbours in one way or another. The earnestness of it all is refreshing after the bluster and cynicism of a bitter campaign.

Should Canada ever move to electronic voting, where we could do it alone at home or elsewhere, this shared experience would be lost. At a time when public connections between people are thinning, voting remains something eligible electors can do together.

This past week, Elections Canada estimated that 4.7 million Canadians cast their vote in the advance polls this year, a 29 per cent increase in advance voting turnout than during the 2015 election. Canadians, it seems, are in the voting mood this year.

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I’ve voted in advance polls before but prefer to wait until election day if I can for the full experience. The walk through the neighbourhood to the polling station always has an air of excitement about it, with people holding voting cards all heading to the same place. That’s an advantage of living in a walkable neighbourhood. In more spread out places this feeling may just be closer to the station: the walk from the car across a parking lot or from a bus stop.

Savour the beautiful day, because when the polls close on Monday night, the yelling will begin again.

Shawn Micallef is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @shawnmicallef