INNISFAIL – With the next municipal election just 13 months away, Town of Innisfail staff are already projecting a challenging budget increase that will also bring burdensome delays in tabulating votes.
The issue was raised at Innisfail town council’s Agenda & Priorities Meeting on Sept. 3 during a preliminary discussion on the upcoming 2025 municipal budget.
Council members will be holding three days of budget deliberations during the third week of November.
Mayor Jean Barclay brought up the 2025 Election Bylaw, which must be passed by council by the end of 2024, and whether town staff had an estimate of the costs for the municipal election in October of next year.
Barclay noted there are new rules under the amended provincial Local Authorities Election Act, including “hand counted” ballots and the creation of a citizen registry.
She warned council it could be costly.
“It's going to be a burden on municipalities, not just ours but across this province,” added the mayor to the Albertan. “I know we're already struggling with thoughts around our budget and how we fund just the very basics, and now we have something like this added on to it.
“Innisfail has been using tabulators for many years and several elections, and there has not been any issues,” she added. “It's just too bad we're having to go down this path, because it's creating a lot of work for administration.
“We're going to have to hire people to hand count ballots, and it'll be a much more onerous.”
The new rules under this year’s revised Local Authorities Election Act have prohibited the use of electronic voting machines in municipal elections.
Erica Vickers, director of corporate services for the Town of Innisfail, told council she has done “some brief high level” cost estimates of about $50,000, which she said was an increase of about 40 per cent compared to the past municipal election.
“That increased cost is all going to be staff hours that will be used to hand count the ballots,” said Vickers.
She said its estimated that six more staff will be needed for the 2025 municipal election, which will bring the total to 16, including herself as returning officer and another town employee.
Adding to the workload for election staff is a citizen registry, a practice found in federal and provincial elections.
“It'll be a little more restrictive, so we'll have to have a few more workers present to deal with this list,” said Vickers. “We'll have to have more booths open that will be tied to people's last names. They’ll have to go to specific booths to vote.
“It could create a few more lineups, depending on how many people with the same letter of their last names,” she added.
She later told the Albertan there will also be a significant delay with announcing municipal election results to the community.
“We will have to start counting manually once the polls close at eight, and we will not stop counting until we're done,” said Vickers. “It will likely be 24 hours or more, depending on how many votes we have to count and how many workers we're able to get.”
With the election held on a Monday and with polls closing at 8 p.m. all municipalities, including Innisfail, must have final results to provincial municipal affairs by the following Friday.
“We will still be fine. It will take a day or two, but we'll get it all counted,” said Vickers.
In the meantime, she said the town is working with the Alberta Municipal Clerks Association in navigating through the new election rules.
“They've kind of really taken a big heavy hand in helping a lot of municipalities do this because most municipalities haven't counted since the early 1990s,” said Vickers. “We don't even know the supplies. We’ve never even bought ballots before, so we're kind of waiting on companies.
“We don't know what the cost those would be now,” she added. “We are saving the cost for the electronic tabulators but now we'll have to buy thousands of ballots.
“We're all in the same boat,” said Vickers of the scores of Alberta municipalities facing the new election rules. “We all don't know what it's going to cost us to get these ballots counted.”
