Albertans had until midnight Friday to request a mail-in ballot for the Oct. 19 referendum, after more than 673,000 people applied to vote by mail, a more than tenfold jump from the roughly 60,000 special ballot requests logged during the province’s 2023 general election.
Elections Alberta reported the total as of Thursday afternoon, according to The Canadian Press. The agency has said the surge, driven largely by relaxed eligibility rules for voting by mail this time around, has strained processing capacity in the weeks leading up to the vote.
The referendum asks Albertans to weigh in on 10 questions put forward by Premier Danielle Smith’s government. Nine of the questions, announced Feb. 19, deal largely with immigration and constitutional reform. Smith added a 10th question on May 21 that asks whether Alberta should remain a province of Canada or whether the provincial government should begin the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding referendum on separation.
Anyone who applied for a mail-in package has until Oct. 16 at 5 p.m. to return it. Albertans who miss that deadline, or whose ballot doesn’t arrive in time, can still cast a vote in person, either during advance voting from Oct. 13 to 17 or on referendum day itself, Oct. 19.
The scale of the mail-in demand echoes an earlier scramble this month. Elections Alberta moved the application deadline up two weeks, from Oct. 9 to Sept. 25, after requests hit 290,000 in early September, about four times the number seen at the same point in the 2023 election. The agency has said the earlier deadline was needed to give staff enough time to process, mail and track that many packages before voting day.
A recent Ipsos poll found 70 per cent of Albertans plan to vote to remain in Canada, with support for beginning the separation process well behind. A separate Research Co. survey in August put the remain side at 74 per cent, against 22 per cent who said they would vote to start the legal process toward a binding separation vote.
Elections Alberta says the referendum will require at least 60,000 workers to administer, and that all ballots, in-person and mailed, must be counted within 48 hours of polls closing on Oct. 19.
The agency has also faced questions over how it has handled the mail-in rollout. Some voters have reported receiving incomplete ballot packages, missing pages from the 10-question ballot, which the agency said arrived glued together at the top with a cardboard backing. Elections Alberta has said its voting register is updated as returned packages come in, which it says prevents anyone from voting twice regardless of how many ballots reach a given household.
With Friday’s deadline now closed to new applications, the size of the mail-in vote is set. What remains unknown is how it breaks down on the referendum’s most closely watched question, and whether it shifts the outcome of a vote already shaped by monthslong campaigns on both sides of the separation question.
