Lorne Gibson has served both as Alberta’s chief electoral officer and its election commissioner. The latter position was created by the NDP Government of premier Rachel Notley in the spring of 2018 to enforce election legislation. It was eliminated by Alberta’s first United Conservative Party Premier, Jason Kenney, at the end of 2019. Mr. Gibson was also deputy chief electoral officer of the province of Manitoba from 1998 to 2006. After the UCP eliminated his job – almost certainly because he enforced the law when it was broken by political allies of Mr. Kenney during the UCP’s first leadership campaign – he returned to Manitoba, where today he runs an election management consultancy in Winnipeg. All of which is to say that Mr. Gibson knows what he’s talking about when it comes to running elections. In this guest post, he has some thoughtful and useful suggestions for Elections Alberta and the Alberta Government on how to deal with the security issues raised by providing lists of electors containing voters’ personal information to election scrutineers in a time when questions of trust rightly raise serious concerns both for voters and policy makers. DJC
By Lorne Gibson
When I first learned that Alberta’s Premier had issued an order effectively prohibiting registered political parties and scrutineers from using voters lists during the upcoming October referendum, I was dumbfounded.
A voters list is a fundamental tool in the administration of an election or referendum. Political parties and scrutineers rely on it to determine which supporters have already voted, identify those who have not yet cast a ballot, and scrutinize the eligibility of individuals who arrive at a voting place but do not appear on the list.
My initial reaction was that the government may have fundamentally misunderstood the role of scrutineers. How, after all, can a scrutineer effectively examine whether voters meet the legal requirements to cast a ballot without access to a list identifying those whose eligibility has already been established? And how can party or proponent scrutineers determine which of their supporters have yet to vote without repeatedly asking election officials to announce voters’ names, addresses and 16-digit identification numbers?
If the government’s intention was to eliminate the practical role of scrutineers, it might have been more straightforward to say so.
With more time to consider the government’s Order in Council announcing the change, however, another interpretation has emerged. The government is now referring to a statistical summary of the number of voters within municipalities and voting areas as a “voters list.” While it is certainly not a voters list, the distinction suggests the Premier may have come to recognize a more fundamental problem: whether political parties, third-party advertisers and referendum proponents can be trusted with an actual voters list containing Albertans’ personal information.
If so, this represents a belated recognition of a serious risk.
Alberta experienced a massive and unprecedented data breach last April when a voters list provided to a political party ultimately appeared on the Internet. That incident demonstrated that information distributed to political parties for legitimate electoral purposes can nevertheless escape the safeguards that are supposed to protect it.
Against that backdrop, there is a reasonable basis for asking what might happen if thousands of electronic and paper copies of voter lists were distributed across the province to a wide range of individuals serving as political party, third-party or referendum scrutineers. Not every person entrusted with such information will necessarily have the same understanding of, or commitment to, the privacy obligations that accompany it.
This leaves the government facing a genuine dilemma.
Scrutineers serve an important function in elections and referenda. Their presence provides an additional check on election officials and helps ensure that established procedures are followed, that voters meet the prescribed qualifications and that each eligible person casts only one ballot. Their role contributes to the integrity, transparency and security of the voting process.
But effective scrutiny requires information.
A scrutineer needs some means of determining whether an individual appearing at a polling place has already been verified as eligible to vote. The voters list provides that mechanism. It is not merely an administrative convenience; it is one of the tools used to help prevent fraud and double-voting.
At the same time, voters should not have to surrender control over highly personal information simply because they are exercising their democratic right to vote. Names, addresses, postal codes and other identifying information can have value well beyond the electoral process, particularly when combined with other databases. The state therefore has an obligation to protect that information from unauthorized use or disclosure.
There may be ways to reconcile these competing interests.
One option would be to provide scrutineers with a physical copy of the voters list only when they arrive at the voting place, with strict requirements that the document remain there and not be photographed, copied or removed. Scrutineers and others are already prohibited from using cellphones to take photographs inside voting places. Additional safeguards could reinforce those restrictions.
Another, more cumbersome and imperfect, approach would be to provide party-affiliated scrutineers only with the unique identifiers assigned to voters, without names, addresses or postal codes. Such a list would be of little practical use to independent scrutineers or referendum proponents. Registered political parties, however, might be able to cross-reference those identifiers against voter information retained from previous elections.
That approach would also have significant limitations. There would be no guarantee of a one-to-one match between the identifiers supplied for the referendum and the information contained in a political party’s existing database. Electoral populations change. Some voters die, new residents arrive, citizens become newly enfranchised and first-time voters enter the system. Party databases can therefore never be assumed to be perfectly synchronized with the official voters list.
The challenge, then, is not simply whether scrutineers should have access to a voters list. It is how to preserve the legitimate oversight function of scrutineers while ensuring that the personal information of Alberta voters is not treated as an unrestricted political resource.
The government’s decision to restrict access may therefore reflect a legitimate concern, particularly in light of the recent data breach. But restricting access to voter information also risks undermining one of the mechanisms designed to provide transparency and accountability at the ballot box.
The answer cannot simply be to choose privacy over electoral oversight, or oversight over privacy. Both are legitimate public interests. The real test is whether the government can devise safeguards that protect Albertans’ personal information without depriving scrutineers of the information they need to perform their statutory role effectively.
That is ultimately a question of trust: trust in the electoral system, trust in those charged with administering it, and trust in the political actors who are given access to the information that makes democratic participation possible.
This order-in-council/regulation has a number of interesting features.
Section 207(1)(d.01) of the EA allows the LG in Council to make regulations “respecting the contents and uses of lists of electors”. However, regulation 227/2026 prevents all information from being included in a List of Electors, essentially eliminating the document.
This is contrary to the Act itself which, through s. 17, mandates that “only the first names, middle names and surnames, the addresses, including postal codes, the telephone numbers and the unique identifier numbers of electors may be contained in the list of electors.”
While the courts have recognized a delegated power to amend legislation—IF THE LEGISLATION GRANTS THAT POWER—it is important to note that no such grant of authority exists in the Election Act.
The question then is, if Regulation 227/2026 is invalid but that it still prevents Lists of Electors from being generated and used for this upcoming referendum, does that invalidate the results of the Referendum itself? Will we have to do it over again?
Lorne is quite right. The voters list allows for three things hopefully. Are you legally able to vote, and you are you. For example quick and not dead in a grave yard. You are legally entitled to vote in Alberta (residence, age, citizen.)How to establish that without address evidence etc. beats me. The third thing is you are not voting a second or third time today. Again without the proper proof of residence and a stroke off list how do you track this? Mickey Amery is surely opening a ballot box labeled FRAUD.
The tracking of the vote by parties during the vote by their appointed scrutineers is integral to keeping the vote and counting fraud free. This new system is as close to inviting open fraud as I can think of; I say that as a former poll captain and scrutineer of more than a couple of hard fought elections. About 25 if I remember at various levels of government.
Well has Mark Carney been made aware of this so he knows what is going on and what this could become? Has anyone sent him a copy of Lorne Gibson’s comments or are we going to just whine about it in typical Alberta fashion ? Have the RCMP been notified? Are lawyers going to try to put through a court injunction to see if this stupidity can be stopped?
Is it really that easy to create a criminally run election ?
I was so relieved that the veracity of our voting systems hadn’t been challenged by Maple MAGA copycats of tRump’s incessant but proven false claim that he won the 2020 presidential election instead of Democrat Joe Biden, a claim cavalierly expanded to mean all US elections are rigged, as tRumpublicans like to accuse Democrats of somehow accomplishing, curiously without leaving any evidence for such a complicated undertaking. Indeed, tRump claimed the 2016 election was rigged against him, even though he won! The investigation he appointed found nothing untoward about 2016 and somebody must have told him to give it a rest. But he hasn’t stopped accusing Dems of rigging elections in general since his first incumbency went down like a tub of shite.
And so it went, nonstop, throughout Biden’s single term during which the former VP for President Obama foolishly tried to slough off tRump’s petulant caterwauling until it was too late to try tRump with ample evidence of his blatant interference with the 2020 election and attempts to rig it himself, charges he ordered the DoJ to drop as soon’s he won in 2024. Still, to keep the agenda rolling, he settled then for falsely claiming to have won by a landslide instead of the marginal plurality he actually did win.
Mob lawyer Roy Cohn mentored the young Donald to never accept blame but instead blame others of doing whatever they’re accusing him of doing, and to attack and never let up, which his SLAPPs, name-calling, insults, defamations, threats, mass firings, and demolitions illustrate without respite. Ergo tRump accuses Dems of planning to rig the 2026 midterms as a false-flag ploy, or excuse to issue executive orders under the ruse of this alleged emergency that would effectively allow GOP candidates to declare themselves winners without regard to vote-counts. Rather convenient since opinion polls that tRump can’t squelch (yet…) forecast a right proper shellacking for Republicans in just over five weeks. They can’t win except by cheating.
Shocking? well, yes and no: certainly elections in free and democratic societies are sacrosanct and may not be abominated. But even more shocking is the fact that tRump has been warning about this for a long time, for example, Hey, maybe the USA won’t have elections anymore—as he once promised evangelicals (“Vote for me and you’ll never have to vote again,” presuming he would impose the theocracy of their dreams), or that federal agents will invigilate voting places, or that mail-ins will be disallowed, or that passports will be required to vote (knowing full well one of the least-world-travelled populations has few passport holders), &c. Or how’s about, “I’ll be a dictator —but for just one day [at a time].” Almost everything tRump says has parenthetical portent.
Worse, election workers have been threatened, some with death, to the extent they’ve had to move residence, incognito. That kinda stuff makes Harper’s intentionally misdirecting “robocalls” and PP’s “Fair Elections Act” (a vote-suppressing scam that was shitcanned almost immediately after the CPC regime was thrashed in 2015), and numerous campaign-funding violations look like child’s play.
When I saw MAGA tropes infiltrating Canada, Jan6 copycats besieging Ottawa, and seditious characters citing US Second Amendment rights in their defence in Canadian courts, I started worrying the contagion was creeping toward the holy-of-holies of our democracy, fair elections. Worry turned to dread when CPC MLAs accused the Liberals of knowing about foreign manipulators in one of their candidates campaigns but kept it secret because he won the riding. Here we go!—my pessimistic side whispered in my ear.
Much to my relief, the charge was addressed to the satisfaction of all the federal party leaders who concluded the suspect donation would not have changed the outcome of the riding election. All federal party leaders except one: the CPC’s Pierre Poilievre refused to get security clearance to view the file because it required an oath of secrecy, and because, he claimed, that would disallow him from using trivia therein to bash Trudeau with his usual relish, fabulate catchy anti-Liberal slogans and rhymes, and generally feed it as grist for his mill of tiresome, rote ad hominem. Oh, and because he’s such a dope for blowing out the guttering issue with an indignant huff.
Of course there have been disputed election results but nearly always settled by re-count protocols that the losers accept not too sorely. I do recall a case—perhaps Mr Gibson can correct me— a very close result which triggered an automatic recount, then a judicial re-count where too many questionable voter registrations to practically verify were discovered that, in my opinion, should have required a complete redo; instead the judge took supposedly representative samples from 10% of the ballot boxes to calculate a verdict which awarded the CPC candidate in Etobicoke the win (that is, the original call remained unchanged), the only time I know of when an election result was arrived at statistically rather than by counting. But out of thousands of races I’m familiar with, none of these petty anomalies changed the results.
Maybe it’s mere coincidence that accusations of voting and/or counting irregularities seem to come from the partisan right, but its representatives’ are such poor-sports when they lose that a pattern seems at least plausible. In addition to the CPC’s convictions (Harper’s press secretary Dean Delmastro was sentenced to a short prison term for campaign-funding violations, for example), I could cite allegations of impropriety concerning Jason Kenney’s election as leader of the shotgun-wedded UCP—“Kamikaze,” I think it was called.
Referenda can have suspect anomalies too as the right-wing and confusingly-titled BC Liberals demonstrated when soon before his ouster for lying on campaign that he wouldn’t impose a Harmonized Sales Tax, premier Campbell was compelled by a Citizens’ Initiative Petition to hold a referendum on the fate of the HST he duplicitously imposed—but not before firing the Chief Electoral Officer of 25 years and his assistant, then installing an “acting” Chief (a loophole to get around the usual appointment by an all-party committee consensus) who had to be taken to court to release the details of the Petition (that is, to announce it had achieved the requisite threshold of signatures) and then dragged out release of the Referendum result which looked suspiciously like the polling numbers of the NDP and BC Liberal parties instead of the pre-Referendum polling which showed a large majority of BC voters disapproved of the hated tax, without doubt crossing party lines by a much larger margin than the margin the “acting” electoral officer presented. In any case, the end result was the same: for the first time in 8 centuries of Westminster parliamentary history a legislated tax was repealed by force of popular measure.
To be fair, I should also note I disapproved of BC’s latest and third electoral-systems Referendum which the NDP promised to hold during the 2017 election and made good on it in 2018. Problem was, cabinet decided the choice of alternative systems—which can be perceived as a conflict of interest that should not happen (the new, properly appointed Chief Electoral Officer concurred with me by email). Apparently psephological naughtiness isn’t always a sin of the partisan right. The worst part was the option of a two-term trial period if one of the alternative systems was elected offended both the finality elections need and the ethic that electoral systems should not become a partisan political football, as a trial period would invite (we don’t want parties to promise to change the system if they’re elected for obvious reasons). Neither alternative systems nor a trial period resulted; nevertheless, none of this should ever happen again.
And so I was occasionally worried and rankled, but generally relieved that the undermining of psephological trust had not breached the US border in any tangible way. Until…
…guess who. And why should I be surprised? The festering nest of Maple MAGA is located in Wild Rose Country where it proudly emulates tRump, and where the separatist UCP government appears to be trying to rig the mooty-patooty “separatist” referendum in the secessionists’ favour.
There’s a lot of bad that can be said of this pointless exercise (there is no legal or constitutional way for Alberta to secede, not even if separation was unanimously approved by referendum—and latest polling shows support for secession slipping while that for remaining in Canada is on the rise, the margin being indisputably large), including that the separatist sentiment will cystically persist even after Albertans vote three-to-one to show their federal patriotism. But worst of all, this unnecessary exercise will undermine trust in voting and elections. Given the unabashed affiliations, should we wonder that it’s exactly the goal?
The perversity of rationalizing such a bad thing as less bad than being annexed by the USA should be a crime for which the UCP is indicted. I would definitely vote for that!—trust me!!