Elections Alberta Delivers Referendum for Projected $84 Million

November 06, 2026

EDMONTON – Today, the Chief Electoral Officer, Gordon McClure, provided a supplemental budget request for $59,552,176 for 2026-27, which was approved by the Standing Committee on Legislative Offices.

This supplemental budget request included:

• $49,558,434 to cover the cost of referendum operations,
• $9,000,000 for 2027 Provincial General Election preparations, and
• $993,742 for additional organizational capacity to deliver on statutory responsibilities.

Elections Alberta projects the cost to deliver the 2026 referendum to be $84,268,919. Elections Alberta’s consistently delivers the lowest cost per capita election events in the country and has the lowest staff per elector ratio of any election management body in Canada.

Scale of referendum

The provincial referendum was an unprecedented electoral event, in both scale, scope, and complexity. Every voter could cast up to ten ballots; one for each of the questions posed to them. The counting of all these ballots had to be completed by hand at hundreds of locations across the province. In total, more than 22 million ballots were counted. This surpasses the total number of ballots cast, in all of Canada, during the 2025 federal election.

The official results were released on October 29, 2026, and can be viewed at officialresults.elections.ab.ca.

It is typical for an electoral management body in Canada to manage one or two electoral events each year. Since January of 2025, there were 58 electoral events across Canada with 37 of those electoral events occurring in Alberta alone.

“We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the team at Elections Alberta and the more than 47,000 Albertans who stepped forward to support this referendum. This was an event of unprecedented scale and scope,” said McClure. “Our budget presentation captures the dollars and cents aspects of conducting this event but does not account for the human capital cost that also went into conducting this referendum.”

Elections Alberta is now focused on the work required to complete the referendum and prepare for the upcoming 2027 Provincial General Election. This will include updates to the voter registry, conducting a full referendum debrief, preparing the Referendum Report, as well as the repatriation and preparation of all equipment and election supplies.

Elections Alberta is an independent, non-partisan office of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta responsible for administering provincial elections, by-elections, and referendums.

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