Alberta referendum fraud claims debunked as counting process explained by election officials

False claims about fraud in Alberta's recent referendum are spreading on social media, but elections officials and a political science expert say the allegations rest on a misunderstanding of how ballots were counted.

On October 20, an anonymous X post claimed that "hundreds of thousands" of mail-in ballots were dumped to affect the independence question outcome. Screenshots showed substantially more votes for the independence question than for others. "That smells of corruption," the post said. The message reached close to 67,000 people.

A second claim alleged that more people voted than the number of registered voters — another misrepresentation of the process, according to Elections Alberta and Duane Bratt, professor of political science at Mount Royal University Calgary.

Bratt called the mail-in dump allegation "ridiculous," and explained the actual sequence: "They had been counting the advanced polls and the mail-in votes since 5 o'clock that afternoon [before polls closed], so it's not surprising that there was a whole bunch of results the moment that they could officially release them." Elections Alberta had announced on May 29 that independence question results would be released first. They released those initial results minutes after the last polling station closed on election day.

The reason for the vote imbalance is straightforward. At each polling station, workers counted the independence question first, then questions 1-9. Some voters found the wording of the remaining questions confusing and skipped them; some were encouraged to vote only on the independence question. Elections Alberta received 519,082 special ballots on the independence question alone. By Wednesday, 2,021,521 total votes had been cast for that question with 95 per cent of locations reporting.

Bratt said: "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."

An Elections Alberta spokesperson called the allegation "disinformation at best and an attempt to deliberately undermine faith in the democratic process at worst."