They register people to vote in Canada by going door-to-door? Really?
I was giving an example, but in Canada, they do an "enumeration" of potential voters. They are given a list of residents, and then they go door to door to make sure that the names are right, that those are the people that live there, etc. It is more like a census than anything else. And if no one is home, they keep on going. My guess is that the Cruz family must not have been home when they came by, since the father's name was mis-spelled and never corrected. But the list does not purport to be a list of registered voters.
By the way, even if they had been registered voters at that time, it really wouldn't matter, since that list is from 1974 - four years after Ted was born. And as has been pointed out, his mom could not have been a Canadian citizen in 1970 even if she had wanted - she hadn't lived there long enough. So perhaps we can now let go of this silly idea that maybe his mother had given up her citizenship before Ted was born...
Canadian citizens just go to the voting station and identify themselves .Their name is stroked off the list and they’re are given a ballot.
In those days , before computers, the enumerators went door to door for every federal election updating voting lists.
A friend moved here from Holland in 1970 and was enumerated for the 1972 federal election. He wasn’t home, his Canadian born wife gave them her name and that of her husband and he was on the list.
The enumerators, (2 local ladies ) never bothered to ask for citizenship. I suspect that happened a lot.
They did in 1974, though not any more.
Prior to an election, enumerators used to go door to door collecting names of voters. This hasn't been done on the national level for almost 20 years, since Elections Canada started compiling voter lists from electronic records such as tax rolls and driver's licences.
This was actually something like our census.