Changes to provincial legislation will likely mean additional costs and a lengthy delay in counting the council and school board trustee votes in the upcoming municipal election, Elections Calgary said Friday.
The legislative changes, introduced in Bill 20 in 2024 in an effort to “increase transparency in local elections,” include new requirements for a permanent electors to register and a ban on the use of electronic tabulators to count ballots.
The new rules mean election workers in Calgary will be required to count each ballot by hand on election night.
“The process is significantly different,” said Kate Martin, returning officer with Elections Calgary. “We will be working as efficiently as we can to deliver those results with integrity, but yes it will take some time.”
Elections Calgary said it is opening additional polling stations across the city for a total of 42 during advance voting between Oct. 6-11. There will be 261 stations on election night, a 40 per cent increase over the 2021 election.
A total of 4,500 election workers are being hired, as well as stand-by workers, to help ensure adequate staffing for counting.
Originally pegged at $1.3 million, the additional costs due to the legislative changes are now estimated at $3.3 million for a total budget of $11.94 million.
“Those costs are really to account for the hand counting of the ballots,” Martin said. “That is going to cost us more in terms of the number of voting stations, the number of election workers that we’re hiring, and of course all the supplies. We are also looking at increasing our technology costs.”
According to Martin, additional staff will be brought in to several polling stations on election night to help with counting when polls close at 8 p.m.
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Advance vote ballots, as well as special ballots, mail-in ballots and ballots from care facilities, shelters and hospitals, will be transported to a special “counting centre” at the Big Four Roadhouse on Stampede Park. They will be carried in secure GPS-tracked “election cart” lockers.
The hand-count of the anticipated 633,000 ballots at the counting centre will begin at 7:30 p.m. on election night, with the mayoral race ballots counted first in the event a recount is required, Martin said.
She added that Calgarians should know who they’ve elected mayor late on the night on Oct. 20. She also said it was unlikely the results of voting for councillors and school boards would be known on election night.
Election workers will begin counting advance and special ballots at the counting centre for council races at 10:30 a.m. on Oct. 21, followed by school board trustee ballots.
Lori Williams, an associate professor of policy studies at Mount-Royal University, said delayed results might not sit well with Calgarians.
“Unless it’s a huge margin of victory, it’ll be difficult to know who will actually be the winners,” Williams said. “Everybody is looking for that result on voting day and it may well blow back on the province that results aren’t available in a timely way because of a policy that people have questions about.”
When asked about the impact of the province’s changes to local election during an unrelated news conference on Wednesday, Premier Danielle Smith pointed to federal elections having results available on election night while counting ballots by hand.
“This is not unusual to have paper ballots to be able to count and I have every confidence that they’ll be able to figure it out,” Smith told reporters.
According to Martin, there were more than 896,000 eligible voters registered in Calgary as of Sept 16.
One of the new requirements under provincial legislation for this year’s vote is that Elections Calgary prepare a permanent electors register, with data already transferred to them by Elections Alberta.
Calgarians who voted in the last provincial election are automatically included on that register, Martin said, but voters aren’t required to be registered to cast a ballot.
To vote in the upcoming election, you must be over the age of 18, a resident of Calgary and a Canadian citizen with a valid piece of identification.
Calgarians can vote at any polling station during advance voting.
Voter information cards will be sent by mail to Calgarians by the end of September, and Elections Calgary has created a voters search tool online to help people find their designated polling station on election day.
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