Municipal elections will take place across Alberta today, but it could take a bit longer than normal for residents to find out the results.
Municipalities have for decades used electronic tabulators, which has typically allowed jurisdictions to project winners on election night.
In 2024, the province banned the use of electronic tabulators in municipal elections, saying hand-counting would bolster trust in the election outcome, which it said is better for democracy.
Aileen Giesbrecht, the returning officer for Edmonton Election, said in an interview with CBC News that she anticipates the preliminary results will all be available on Tuesday.
When voting stations in Edmonton close at 8 p.m. MT, counting tables will be set up within each of the 222 stations, she said.
A count centre will also be set up to count the roughly 42,000 advance votes as well as votes cast at institutions, such as seniors’ facilities, hospitals and post-secondary institutions.
Aileen Giesbrecht is the returning officer for Edmonton Elections. (Google Meet)
There are individual ballots for mayor, councillor and school trustee, Giesbrecht said.
“Once the counting process starts, we’ll be starting with the mayor’s boxes. Once that’s done, we’ll be moving to the councillors’ boxes. Once that’s done, we’ll be moving to the school board ballots,” Giesbrecht said, adding she expects the first results that will be posted online will be for the mayoral race.
WATCH | How hand-counting will work in Edmonton municipal election:
In a video posted online by the city, count workers are each assigned a candidate and sort ballots until each worker has all the ballots for their corresponding candidate.
Then they count their pile of ballots and record the number on a tally sheet; count workers then move one seat to the right and count that pile, recording that number in the tally sheet. Both numbers need to match to be validated, or the count is repeated.
Giesbrecht said hand-counting will run until close to midnight, and if the ballots are not all counted, they will be transferred back to Edmonton Elections custody and transferred to the count centre.
Hand-counting will resume at 9 a.m. Tuesday until the process is complete.
With the change to hand-counting, Giesbrecht said an additional 1,500 election workers will be hired for Monday’s election, estimating this election will cost an extra $4.5 million.
She said there was “pretty rigorous training” for election workers, count workers and count supervisors.
‘Significant workload’
Aleksander Essex, a software engineering professor at Western University, said the removal of electronic tabulators does not allow for quick vote counts on election night.
Aleksander Essex is a software engineering professor at Western University. (Google Meet)
“It creates a significant workload and those cities are then having to produce these election results quickly but they’re constrained by the hand-counting,” he said.
While he agrees with the need for transparency in vote counting, Essex warns that results in Alberta municipalities may not be timely.
“They might be delayed by several days or even longer as the municipal election officials count up all of those contests by hand,” he said.
“People have expectations about the timeliness of election reporting so if an election agency is not able to meet those expectations, it could mean that there’s going to be some unhappy people in the province, and that’s unfortunate.
“I also think it’s unnecessary because we can do tabulators and deliver transparency in the vote counting at the same time.”
