Municipalities should accept responsibility for long queues and delayed results last week because they had “ample time” to prepare for election day, the provincial government has maintained.
New requirements were approved in the spring of 2024 and local governments should have been staffed up and ready, the office for Municipal Affairs Minister Dan Williams said in an e-mailed statement.
“If a municipality’s election authority was unable to come up with an effective plan, it is up to the local authority to explain to voters and candidates why long waits have developed,” the statement said.
Long lines at polling stations Oct. 20 and count delays were reported across the province. Problems were most likely in larger centres because of the volumes of votes and voters, especially in municipalities that in the past used electronic tabulators. Provincial legislative changes banned the use of the tabulators, meaning all municipalities had to count ballots by hand.
Also changed were voter identification requirements, meaning some voters had to fill out attestation forms. Published reports blamed lineups of a half hour to two hours or more on the forms and understaffing, with some Albertans saying they were unable to cast their votes at all before polls closed.
Said the Municipal Affairs statement: “Voter attestation forms are a normal part of an election process and should not delay a properly staffed voting location.”
Some municipalities didn’t publish results until later in the week instead of the same day as polling or early the next morning.
The NDP’s new municipal affairs critic said the rules were an expensive misstep made by the UCP.
Local governments were forced to pick up the tab for ideologically driven legislation not of their own making, said Rob Miyashiro.
The member for Lethbridge-West, Miyashiro said in an e-mailed statement: “The UCP’s new voting rules and ban on tabulators created long lines at polling stations, led to delayed results and downloaded millions of dollars onto municipalities.”
Changes were “a solution to a problem that didn’t exist,” the shadow minister said. “They were driven purely by ideology and need to be repealed.”
Miyashiro, a former Lethbridge city councillor, said he’s been part of efficient municipal elections. “When I last ran, we had accurate results within an hour. This time, things were very different.”
It took three days for the mayoral and council races to be unofficially declared in Miyashiro’s southern Alberta city. Official results weren’t declared until Thursday, CTV News reported.
Lethbridge hasn’t counted its election ballots by hand since 1989, the Lethbridge Herald reported. The cost of running the election was estimated to almost double to over $650,000 this year.
The Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo in northern Alberta, home to the oilsands centre of Fort McMurray, also saw election costs double, to about $600,000. The Fort McMurray Today reported long lines at the ballot boxes and a count that took nearly 19 hours for first results.
Turnout of the electorate generally dropped across Alberta, typically by about 10 percentage points to one in four or five voters. The City of Lethbridge collapse was particularly dramatic at about 15 percentage points, official stats from its administration reveal. Voter turnout was just 19.35 per cent in 2025 for the city, compared with 34.88 per cent four years ago.
The St. Albert Gazette reported a drop of about five percentage points to about 30 per cent of the Edmonton suburb’s electorate. The City of Red Deer cited a drop of nearly 10 percentage points to just over 21 per cent.
Numbers for Lacombe County — a rural community along the QE II corridor north of Red Deer — show a drop of more than 10 points in contested divisions to about 27 per cent from the historically reported number of 37.7.
In some locales, a drop was negligible or non-existent. In the Town of Taber election in southern Alberta, for example, the electorate percentage appears to have been around 29 per cent in each of the two elections.
And some municipalities may even have seen their turnout go up, based on published reports. Bucking the trend, Fort Macleod appears to have seen an increase in voter turnout of about two percentage points to nearly 38 per cent.
The minister’s office said it will examine election data. “Following every municipal election, we review our legislation and regulations to identify if any improvements need to be made.”
But Miyashiro’s statement calls on the UCP to rethink its approach to dealing with municipalities. “The government should focus on working with municipalities, not ordering them around like children,” it said.
