Danielle Smith is determined to take Alberta elections back in time as she continues efforts to appease her base.
The premier doubled down last week on a pledge to legislate the hand counting of ballots despite overwhelming evidence – to say nothing of common sense – that suggests such an idea should be a non-starter in the 21st century.
Eighty-five per cent of members at last week’s Alberta Municipalities (ABmunis) convention supported a resolution asking the Province to give towns and cities the choice in how they count ballots, yet Smith responded by saying that voters can expect hand-counting ballots to be the only option in future local, and possibly provincial, elections.
Local governments are concerned, and rightly so, about the consequences of such a move as it's going to take far longer and cost significantly more to conduct elections moving forward. Some larger municipalities have estimated it could cost an extra $1 million because of the hand-counting mandate.
Such expenditures could be justified if the move improved the accuracy of vote tabulations, but there’s no proof that hand counting is more accurate or that vote-counting machines are somehow compromising the integrity of elections. If anything, hand-counting is far more likely to lead to human error and will bring back all those spoiled ballots that vote-counting machines catch before they go into the box.
So why will we be spending untold millions of taxpayers’ dollars to go back decades to a time when hand-counting was the only option? According to the premier, who spoke to media at the ABmunis convention: “What we have heard is that people want to go back to counting ballots the old-fashioned way.”
Not quite sure who she’s been talking to, but that money could be put to much better use than to placate a small number of people with a mistrust of voting machines.
