Sarah Mills: Alberta's referendum is Canada's wake-up call
Sarah Mills says Canada needs better collaboration between Ottawa and the provinces. She says what's good for Quebec sho...
Posts questioning the results in Alberta’s referendum spread on the social media platform X this week as the numbers were released. One claimed that hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots were dumped to answer just one of the questions put to voters — the 10th question asking about independence. Another concluded more people had voted than the number of registered voters. Elections Alberta and one expert say the people making these claims either misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented the vote-counting process.
THE CLAIM
An Oct. 20 post on X alleged that hundreds of thousands of special ballots were dumped to tilt the outcome of the independence referendum question in favour of Alberta remaining in Canada.
“Look at the dump of mail in votes for the Alberta Referendum. Almost all … the mail in ballots appear to only have answered question 10,” it said, posting screenshots of live preliminary results for each referendum question from the Elections Alberta site. The figures in the screenshot showed substantially more votes tallied for the independence question than for the others.
“That smells of corruption,” the post, which had received close to 67,000 views hours it was posted, continued.
THE FACTS
Duane Bratt, a professor of political science at Mount Royal University in Calgary, described the claim about a mail-in ballot dump as “ridiculous.”
He said the sudden appearance of the results for the independence question after the polls closed was expected, as the government had said results for that question would be announced first, and workers had begun counting the ballots hours before polls closed.
“They had been counting the advanced polls and the mail-in votes since 5 o’clock that afternoon, so it’s not surprising that there was a whole bunch of results, the moment that they could officially release them,” Bratt said.
Bratt referred to Elections Alberta releasing the initial results for the question minutes after the last poll closed, with the results showing a sizable lead for Alberta remaining in Canada over the option of a referendum on leaving the country.
Soon afterwards, the results for the remaining questions also began to trickle out.
In an emailed statement Tuesday from Elections Alberta, the office said that there was no mail-in ballot dump, and that they had announced the order in which results would be released on May 29.
The office added that it received 519,082 special ballots on the independence question. The Elections Alberta live results web page on Wednesday showed 2,021,521 total votes cast for this question, with 95 per cent of locations reporting.
“This allegation now is disinformation at best and an attempt to deliberately undermine faith in the democratic process at worst,” an Elections Alberta spokesperson said.
Bratt added that, while the polling stations workers were counting the ballots for the independence question, they would also count the ballots for the remaining questions.
“In each polling station, they counted Question 10 first, then they went through one to nine. That is why there was a discrepancy, and there continues to be a discrepancy in the totals that emerged,” he said in an interview Tuesday.
Bratt added that another reason for the discrepancy was that some voters may have found the wording of the remaining questions confusing and skipped them, and others were encouraged to vote only on the independence question. Voters were free to answer as many referendum question as they chose.
“If you were to vote in person, you don’t have to take all 10, you don’t have to drop off all 10. It’s the same thing with the special ballots,” he said. “You could submit one ballot or you could submit 10 ballots.”
THE CLAIM
Another Oct. 20 post on X questioned the number of votes processed compared to the number of eligible voters, appearing to equate each valid vote cast with a voter and alleging there might be an “election fraud.”
“Elections Alberta noted in advance that the province had 3,148,343 eligible voters,” the post said. “The problem is that the numbers below add up to 4,352,679 votes cast.”
The post, which received more than 190,000 views in the hours after it appeared, claimed there were 1.2 million more votes than eligible voters, adding that it was hard to believe 100 per cent of eligible voters took part in the referendum.
THE FACTS
Elections Alberta’s referendum results website provides a clear distinction between the number of eligible voters and the number of votes cast.
The vote total represents “valid votes cast across 10 questions,” in which each ballot submitted counts as one vote. For this referendum, each voter received 10 ballots, one for each question, so in theory the maximum number of votes cast is 10 times the number of voters.
The official results for all 10 questions are expected to be released and finalized on Oct. 29, according to the web page.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 21, 2026.
Timon Johnson, The Canadian Press
