The City of St. Albert has discovered a discrepancy in the way the city has calculated voter turnout rates in previous civic elections.
Mayor Nolan Crouse said he discovered an oddity in the historical record when he noticed that the number of eligible voters listed for the 2007 election was lower than for the 2004 election. This didn’t make sense given that the city grew during that period.
Census manager Travis Peter attempted to duplicate the previous results but couldn’t so he recalculated the figures using the methodology staff devised for the 2010 vote. This produced a voter turnout of 34 per cent for the 2007 election, rather than the 37.2 per cent that was publicized at the time. This means that the 2010 result of 34 per cent is even with the last election.
“On the whole scheme of things, it’s not a big deal but I do want to make sure that we’re comparing apples to apples and we weren’t,” Crouse said.
The recalculation pegs the 2004 voter turnout at 46 per cent, not 43.9. The 2001 results were 38.5, not 35.3.
Calculating voter turnout requires municipal officials to estimate the number of eligible voters, Peter said. Since not every household responds to municipal surveys, officials have to estimate the number of people in the household, for which there is no standard practice.
Peter doesn’t know how St. Albert handled this for previous elections because he started working for the city just prior to the 2007 election. He said his failed attempts to replicate the results of previous elections led him to conclude that the previous process was flawed.
The city has documented its 2010 methodology so it will be available for future employees to follow should there be staff turnover, said chief legislative officer Chris Belke. Staff have also updated the city’s election results website but aren’t asking the province to rewrite the history books, he said.
The lack of a standardized method for estimating the number of eligible voters means comparing voter turnout rates between different municipalities is of limited use, Belke said.
Peter’s research found that some municipalities rely on federal census figures while others rely on municipal census figures, which can be anywhere from a few months to four years old.
“One municipality we spoke to simply takes their most recent census population and multiplies it by 75 per cent to estimate their number of eligible voters,” Peter said.
Belke and Peter raised the issue at a meeting of the Alberta Municipal Clerks Association after the election. It would be favourable if there was a provincial standard for estimating eligible voters but such a step is unlikely because it would require an official enumeration, said association president Doug Tymchyshyn, who is returning officer for Parkland County.
“Doing enumeration is very expensive and adds significant cost to an election. That’s why you’ll find across Alberta that a lot of municipalities don’t do enumeration,” Tymchyshyn said.
