(ID 92794541 © Damir Senčar | Dreamstime.com)

By Ashley Lavallee-Koenig

no tabulators, but we can fly to the moon?

New municipal election rules could lead to increased cost and processing time

Sep 3, 2024 | 9:39 PM

City council is expecting the results of the next municipal election, slated for October 2025, to take significantly longer to count and cost the City $1.5 million, which is 3.5 times higher than past general elections.

A report received by city council Sept. 3 attributed both the increased time and cost to Bill 20, now known as the Municipal Affairs Statues Amendment Act, 2024, a provincial bill that received Royal Assent on May 30.

Due to concerns around election interference, the act prohibits the use of electronic tabulators, which the City has used since 1992 and typically produce unofficial results in four to six hours following an election.

“It’s a tabulator. It’s a self-contained system that just has one function. If that function isn’t working, don’t deal with a whole new system to circumvent that piece of equipment or that resource, rigorously test that so it becomes flawless at doing the job it needs to do,” said City Councillor Lawrence Lee of the ban. “If you can’t test that out in this day and age where we’re sending people to who knows where, to the moon, Mars and beyond, we’re in big trouble.”

As a result, the City will need to hand count the ballots, which will each include a selection for mayoral candidates, up to eight city councillors, and five school board trustees. Hand counting can be straightforward when only one role is being filled, but the number of candidates and votes needing to be cast in the municipal election complicates the process.

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A study done over the summer tested and evaluated a variety of approaches to counting, and found that a “call and tally” approach had a favourably low margin of error. This approach, however, requires teams of four to call, tally, and witness the votes on each individual ballot, which can be a slow process.

The City is estimating a 30 per cent voter turnout and one provincial referendum question for about 90,000 ballots total. To hand count results in the same four hours as tabulators have previously done, the City would need to hire an unrealistic 1,200 temporary election workers.

Realistically, officials estimate they can hire about 200 counting staff to work eight hour shifts, with results being counted by about three days after the election. They add that even this might be difficult as a federal election falls in the same month, so both the Government of Canada and the City of Red Deer will be looking to hire from the same pool of workers.

Councillor Kraymer Barnstable shared that to his recollection, the results of the 2021 municipal election took about three days to confirm, despite the use of tabulators, due to voting errors.

“It did take three days to get that sorted so the timeframe of waiting, that’s not really the big issue. Having people count the votes, that’s not really a big issue. I think if the province is going to put something like this forward, then they have to put it forward with the dollars to go with it,” he said. “They cannot put the cost on municipalities.”

In addition to the projected cost of counting by hand, the act requires municipalities to maintain a permanent registry of voters. This digital document would need to be updated during elections to reflect voting residents’ current address, phone number, gender, and date of birth.

City officials anticipate this software to cost between $100,000 and $200,000, although they’re still working through the logistics of how this will work.

Council is likely to move forward with election planning under the current conditions of Bill 20, and in the meantime will advocate for changes to the legislation.

“Our hope of course is a number of things that the report talked about: it’s either pending it to 2029 so we can get financial resources and a bit of a game plan, and also to allow the province to conduct its own election in a manual basis. Or, [they] limit this legislation to only those cities that are less than 100,000 — or 50,000 for that matter — because the smaller the vote count, the more easily it can be attended to. Or repeal it altogether,” opined Mayor Ken Johnston on what changes the City might propose to the province.

“There are a number of things that we’ll talk to the province about, but the reality is that unless that bill is amended or changed, then we have what we have for next October.”

Mayor Johnston added that these concerns will be addressed during the Annual General Meeting for Alberta Municipalities, which takes place next month in Red Deer. He noted Rocky Mountain House has made a motion to repeal the tabulator prohibition and he expects most municipalities to support it.

An election bylaw outlining the nomination, campaign, and voting processes is expected to come to council in October, although the vote-counting mechanism might not be decided until late next summer in the event the Province considers Bill 20 changes.

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