While municipal election day in Alberta is now just days away, many voters are going to be forced to wait a lot longer to find out who the winners in their community are.
New provincial legislation, passed by the UCP government in 2024, means all the ballots will need to be counted by hand instead of machine — increasing the cost and time of determining the results.
“That is a little bit of an unknown for us this year as we’ve used tabulators in the past,” said Cathy Duplessis, returning officer for the town of Okotoks near Calgary.
“We have had to hire approximately 80 people to come in at the close of voting stations to hand count.”
Hiring all those extra people means the cost of holding the election has doubled, said Duplessis.
While the town hopes to have the unofficial results available sometime on Tuesday, the official results must be submitted to the province by noon on Friday, Oct. 24.
In Red Deer, returning officer Jessica Robinson said the central Alberta city had to hire about 500 election workers, compared to 250 in the last election.
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While the city is planning to provide daily updates on vote counting, Robinson said hand-counting them all will take a lot more time than normal.
“We’re gonna start on Monday night, but we are probably going to be going for a few days. I know for sure that we will get them announced by Friday at noon to meet the legislation, but in between that time, I don’t have an exact time when I’ll be able to tell people,” said Robinson.
“We’ll be as fast as we can to be as accurate as we can, because you know that the most important thing is having accurate results that we’re confident in,” added Robinson.
In Cochrane, returning officer Jaylene Robertson says the town started its election planning last December.
“We collaborated with our colleagues across the province because the bulk of municipalities were using vote tabulators, (but) certainly not all of them, so the few that had been hand counting all along gave us some tips and tricks to be used by the rest of us,” said Robertson.
Cochrane has also hired double the number of election workers compared to the last election, partly to count ballots and partly to help run the additional polling stations in place this year.
While ballot counting will begin as soon as the polls close, Robertson expects counting just the advance poll ballots to take up to five hours.
“I think a lot of the municipalities I’ve spoken to, we have a hard stop of counting at midnight,” said Robertson.
“You have greater risk of errors from just sheer exhaustion of our ballot counters, and so we’ll resume again on Tuesday morning at 8 a.m. and then we’ll have a pretty good indication of how long we think it will take from there.”
In Edmonton, election officials said the counting will stop at 1 am. Tuesday and resume at 9 a.m.
The new election rules were put in place despite criticism from Alberta Municipalities, which called them “completely at odds with the Government of Alberta’s commitment to reduce red tape.”
However, in a statement emailed to Global News, a spokesperson for Alberta’s Minister of Municipal Affairs, Dan Williams, called the counting of ballots by hand a cornerstone of democracy.
“Requiring all ballots to be counted by hand will ensure that all Albertans can trust the methods and results of their local elections, which is better for democracy.”
“The time and cost to manually count ballots is outweighed by the increased confidence in election results,” added the statement.
But municipal returning officers say that increased confidence will also require a lot more patience.
“Our goal in this manual process is to ensure that we thoroughly count every ballot and that every ballot is clearly reflected in the results,” said Robertson.
“We want to do it well, not fast. And so we are just asking for residents patience.”
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