Danielle Smith disregards Alberta municipalities' vote to keep electronic counting machines

Alberta’s municipal leaders want the province to overturn its ban on vote counting machines, but the premier says her government isn’t changing course.

Amendments to Alberta’s local elections rules in Bill 20 prohibited the use of vote tabulators and electronic voting machines. Municipalities have raised concerns that a return to hand counting votes would delay results, reduce accuracy, and increase costs.

At the Alberta Municipalities (ABmunis) convention in Red Deer on Thursday, 85 per cent of members voted in support of a resolution brought forward by St. Albert to ask the province to reverse these changes and give towns and cities the choice of how they count their ballots.

The Town of Innisfail is estimating future election costs will be about double what they were in 2021, mostly due to increased staffing needs to replace the work done by the voting machines, said Erica Vickers, the town's director of corporate services.

Vickers said the town is still developing the counting procedure and is watching to see how other municipalities handle the loss of vote counting machines in their communities.

“I do believe that this is kind of a big shock. This will definitely be a big change for most municipalities,” Vickers said.

Shortly after the motion passed, Smith told media at the convention that voters can expect hand-counting ballots to be the only option in future local, and possibly provincial elections.

“What we have heard is that people want to go back to counting ballots the old-fashioned way, by paper. And so that's what we're going to do at the provincial level, and we've started doing that at the municipal level,” Smith said.

"We're not prepared to ask them to do something that we're not doing ourselves. We'll be debating doing the same thing at the provincial level when the Elections Act changes come through next spring."

Smith also dismissed concerns that eliminating vote counting machines, which have been used in the province since at least the 1990s, would mean people had to wait longer to get results.

“I think that the promise of vote counting machines was that we would end up with faster election results and people would feel confidence in the results. And unfortunately, that didn't happen,” she said.

St. Albert Mayor Cathy Heron said she has heard no one in her municipality express distrust in the vote tabulators or election results and said she hopes there can still be a productive conversation with the government on this issue.

“I would really like to sit down with the premier and (Municipal Affairs Minister Ric McIver) and say, ‘Why? Why the voting machines? Why are your heels dug in on this one?’” Heron said.

“I don't know if it's really about trust in elections or pleasing a few UCP members leading up to the leadership review.”

Heron said St. Albert is projecting the price tag for the 2025 municipal election will be just under $1 million more than in 2021, and that it will take three to four days to count all the votes. A report presented to Red Deer council calculated the city would need to spend about $1 million more next year than in the last election.

In his first address to ABmunis since becoming leader of Alberta’s NDP, Naheed Nenshi promised the convention in Red Deer an NDP government would scrap Bill 20.

“We will take our thumb off the scale of municipal elections and stop trying to put in people friendly to us, and let people vote for the people who best represent them by repealing the election provisions of Bill 20. And by the way, we won't cave into conspiracy theorists and cost you hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. We'll let you use the damn vote counting machines,” Nenshi said.

Smith said her government has asked municipalities to submit the statement of their costs and “so that we can help defray them.”