I’m not referring to the results. I’m referring to all the ways the UCP government changed how our municipal elections work to quote them “strengthen democracy” and things were objectively worse in every way.
Yes, I’m talking about the voting, the counting, the campaigning, everything. It was a shitshow. There’s no sugar coating it.
Voting
Voters reported long lines all day and you can’t just chalk that up to timing with the Blue Jays game and the high number of undecided people who had to wait until election day to make up their minds. The system was broken. A lot of voters had to re-register, have their ID checked twice, had to watch election workers fill out another form by hand. It was just really confusing and I don’t remember the process being so cumbersome. But it was 100% the UCP’s requirement to have forms filled out by hand that slowed things down.
I voted in advance and my wait was maybe 20 minutes. I did have to update my address so yes that would take some more time. But not that many people would share that same experience so much that it would cause waits of around two hours.
My friend, who was voting for the first time ever, also was confused by an election worker who asked if she wanted to vote for a public or private school trustee. They would’ve meant public or separate school board trustee. But even when she said public, she didn’t receive a ballot for it.
Counting
I spent election night as a scrutineer at the central counting centre. Bless all the people who were hired to manually count every vote by hand because they should never have had to. The UCP banned voting tabulators for no other reason than because some conspiracy theorists told them to. And so, it took about four hours to get any solid results on the race for mayor.
Just to contrast this. I scrutineered the advance vote in 2021. The process went like this: polls closed at 8:00, the election official turned on the tabulator machines, pressed report on all of them, and I was out of there by 9:30. When I left, none of my advance vote reporting actually mattered because the counts were already done at every other polling station. When I got in my car, I already knew who was going to be on city council. It’s 7:00 AM the next morning as I write this and we’re firm on maybe three councillors who are far ahead enough in their races that the advance vote won’t make a difference. What a huge change.
The folks at Elections Calgary tried their hardest to train the workers consistently but I saw dozens of booths all with different methods of sorting and counting ballots. Some would sort on the table while others sorted ballots into bins. Some checked the ballot for an official’s initials first, then sorted, then counted. Others checked and sorted at the same time. Some counted both first and second counts where we could see. Others did the second count turned away from us. One booth would fill in their results sheets in plain view of scrutineers while others did it at the back so we couldn’t see it.
All of this was incredibly inefficient and definitely not any more secure than before. This is not the fault of the counters. They were all very lovely and so were the supervisors overseeing things. A few of them looked at me and commented on why we didn’t have electronic counting.
Campaigning
How could an election be fair when belonging to a party gives you a fundraising advantage? This doesn’t mean every party candidate raised more money than an independent but that kind of advantage should never exist.
It’s pretty obvious the provincial government allowed for parties to exist in Calgary and Edmonton to make it easier to elect conservatives in the big cities. The plan was always to consolidate support around one candidate, put conservative on their stuff and cruise to victory. They even gave them that fundraising advantage.
For the most part, parties were soundly rejected but it’s not like they had absolutely no impact. Kim Tyers in Ward 1 and Mike Jamieson in Ward 12 either wouldn’t have won or would’ve had a harder time winning if not for their party affiliation. For Tyers, she was running to replace Councillor Sonya Sharp, and being in the same party sure makes it very easy for Sharp’s previous supporters to just pick the person on the same team. She still almost lost.
Jamieson’s situation is more interesting because he ran against two party candidates and only won by 59 votes. One of his opponents was in the other conservative-branded party. No doubt voters in Ward 12 were looking for someone calling themselves a conservative. Considering some thought Sharp’s Communities First party was too centrist, it would seem like voters chose the even more conservative Jamieson.
Meanwhile, some of Jamieson’s A Better Calgary colleagues probably did better purely because of that branding. I doubt Tony Dinh would’ve picked up so many votes in Ward 9 to finish third if he wasn’t in the party. And Christy Edwards in Ward 3 absolutely would not have gotten 3,000 votes if she wasn’t in the party. Her flyers were literal trash and she didn’t do any campaigning.
Absolute failure
The election wasn’t made better in any way and I don’t expect the UCP to go back and look at what could be improved. I wish the new council would make a public statement calling out all these issues. It was clearly terrible and there’s no way the next election in four years should be run the same way. It was less efficient, less fair, less accessible and more expensive. That’s an epic fail.
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