Alberta municipalities brace for manual ballot counting as election day nears

Some communities may have to wait days to find out the winners of Monday's municipal election due to a provincial ban on using machines to count ballots.

Expect results for Monday’s municipal election to be published later than usual.

Last fall, the Alberta government prohibited cities and towns from using machines to count ballots in an effort to raise trust in election integrity.

Now, some communities may have to wait days to find out who won.

In previous votes that saw jurisdictions use electronic tabulators to count ballots, results would become available soon after polls closed.

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“Historically, we’ve had our results out starting as early as 8:15 p.m. on election night, with all of our polls reporting by 9,” Jacqueline Roblin, Strathcona County’s manager of legislative services and contract management, told CTV News Edmonton on Friday.

The province made the move to ban automated vote counting, citing a Leger poll from June 2024 that found 36 per cent of Albertans don’t trust electronically counted ballots.

Strathcona County, which borders Edmonton’s east end and includes the communities of Sherwood Park, Ardrossan and Josephburg, had used machines to count votes since the 1980s without issue.

Now, the county – along with every other community in the province – will instead count the 90,000 anticipated votes by hand. Roblin said the county has increased its election night staffing by almost 67 per cent at a cost of $140,000 for this election.

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To minimize errors, it will employ a fresh shift of workers for the count.

“When you introduce humans into any kind of counting mechanism, you’re bound to get errors,” Roblin said.

It will be a slower process, especially in races where voters select several candidates on a single ballot, such as those for school board races in Strathcona County or for city councillors in St. Albert.

Municipalities across Alberta have different targets for sharing results.

Most plan to release them incrementally as they come in from polling stations.

Edmonton expects to share its first numbers at 10 p.m., while Calgary is prioritizing mayoral results to get them out sooner.

St. Albert may not know who its new leaders are until Tuesday or later, as the Edmonton bedroom community will only release results once they’ve all been counted and verified.

In Strathcona County, Roblin says the extra expense, training and rigour is worth it to get results out as early as possible.

“We felt the longer the count takes, residents start to get a little anxious about the results,” she said, adding they’re “confident that it’s going to be a smooth day.”

“We’re getting there. We’re feeling prepared. There’s a lot more paperwork that we have to go through and a lot more rigour that we have to put around our results and make sure people are counting the ballots accurately. They’re recording it accurately.

“They’re getting it into the right piece of software that will then communicate with our election central that we’ll be pushing them out, but we’re there.”