The province’s ban on electronic vote tabulators means St. Albert residents will likely wait days to learn the results of the Oct. 20 municipal elections.
In past elections, results have been available the night of the election, but the Government of Alberta's Municipal Statutes Amendment Act — also known as Bill 20 — requires ballots to be counted manually.
St. Albert's substitute returning officer Janice Vollrath had a mock count set up in council chambers on Thursday, June 12, with a number of municipalities taking part. This was the second mock count city staff have done, with the first having taken place in April.
Vollrath said the mock counts are opening their eyes to issues they had not even considered.
"We have to test how counters feel after one box," Vollrath said. "We're testing 'How did you guys feel about the ballot? Was the paper slippery? Did it hurt your eyes? Was the colour too bright?' Things you wouldn't really think of."
She added the counters suggested ideas to try for counting.
"When the province introduced Bill 20, there wasn't a method of counting given to us, really," she said. Municipalities were simply told that they had to manually count ballots.
"So every municipality is just figuring out how to count ballots. We're all working regionally together."
They tested three methods on June 12, the first of which was sort and count, which is being used for the mayor's ballots.
"It's been tested, tried and true, many times," Vollrath said. "Calgary has used it many times. They've checked it against lots of different cities, provinces throughout Canada. It's a really quick, efficient and accurate method."
Another method was call and tally, which happened during their last mock count in April.
"Some of the issues with that is it's very loud, and when you're in a counting centre and you're calling out names, it can be very distracting," Vollrath said.
Another method they tested for the councillors race on June 12 involved laying out multiple ballots alongside one another, adding up the vote totals, and then getting another counter to verify.
Results likely to take longer
St. Albert is an "at large" municipality, like Red Deer, Fort Saskatchewan and Airdrie, and unlike Edmonton and Calgary, which are ward municipalities. As a result, ballots are longer and more complex, with voters choosing multiple candidates per ballot, resulting in many different possible vote combinations.
This means counting -— especially for the councillor and school board trustee ballots — will take significantly longer.
With the ban of electronic tabulators, it was said during a recent committee of the whole meeting it could take days before municipalities know the results. The province's deadline for when municipalities must have official results posted is Friday, Oct. 24.
In an email following Thursday's mock count, the city's election spokesperson Kathy DeJong said staff were still going through the materials, debriefing notes, and making decisions, with further testing on suggested improvements likely to come.
