How did two Edmonton city council front-runners go from being six votes apart, to more than 600?
The question has been on many minds over the past 24 hours, after that scenario played out in a ward where no incumbent left the race wide open for newcomers.
“It was clearly human error,” said political analyst John Brennan.
But who messed up and how?
The race for city council was tight in the west Edmonton election ward of sipiwiyiniwak, after incumbent Sarah Hamilton elected not to run for council again.
Seven people ran for the open seat, and the top contenders came so close after the first round of hand counting, election officials said the ballots all needed to be examined again.
Story continues below advertisement
After all the ballots from 23 polling stations and advance votes were counted, the first and second-place candidates were just six votes apart.
Better Edmonton candidate Darrell Friesen got 6,060 votes and independent candidate Thu Parmar got 6,054 votes.
Parmar said it was closer than expected but she accepted the results and was already looking to get on with life and return to her job at the Canadian Red Cross.
Then, she got a call from elections officials.
More on Politics
More videos
“They knew something was wrong,” Parmar said.
On Wednesday, Edmonton Elections called a preliminary recount for the city council race as the returning officer believed “there may have been administrative or technical mistakes that caused an error in the count of votes.”
After the second count, Parmar not only came out in the lead with 6,667 votes, but she beat Friesen by 600 votes.
“It was more than I anticipated for sure, as far as the difference,” Friesen told Global News. He received 6,040 votes and conceded the election.
“I think at times you have to let the outcome happen,” Friesen said. “First we voted, then we re-checked it, and the outcome was not in my favour.
Story continues below advertisement
“So you have to respect what democracy is.”
So how was there such a big discrepancy?
On Thursday, Edmonton Elections released an explanation and chalked it up to human error in the hand-counting ballot process — something required due to 2024 provincial legislation banning electronic voting.
The city said ballot accounting is the process of confirming the accuracy of preliminary election results by reconciling the ballot counting documents used.
This includes the counting tally sheets for each table, the consolidated tally sheets, the final Form 19 (Statement of Results) and the final entry into the voter view results system which is published to Open Data and ultimately online for all to see.
Get breaking National news
For news impacting Canada and around the world, sign up for breaking news alerts delivered directly to you when they happen.
As part of this process which began on Wednesday, a transposition error from one of the tally sheets was identified for ward sipiwiyiniwak.
While counting the advance vote ballots at the Edmonton EXPO centre, the counting teams found one candidate, Roger Kotch, was missing from the first tally sheet and manually added it.
The counting results were correctly recorded on that tally sheet.
However, when the results were consolidated into a second tally sheet, the results were copied over incorrectly as the candidate names were not in the same order.
Story continues below advertisement
“This human error during advance vote counting caused the wrong results to be added to Form 19 and entered into the results system and published,” Elections Edmonton said in a statement on Thursday.
Put simply, someone entered the wrong data in the wrong place, resulting in the wrong candidate — Kotch — getting extra votes that should have instead gone to Parmar.
“All you can attest that to is human error — it happens, usually not on this large scale,” said Brennan.
He said the provincial governing UCP forcing municipalities to go back to hand-counting ballots is a big part of the issue.
“Edmonton Elections has been using vote tabulating machines for decades. I think going back to the 1980s. This is the first time they’ve gone back to hand-counted ballots for a long time, and so it obviously created some problems.”
Story continues below advertisement
2:12
Some Alberta voters ‘walk away’ from municipal election lineups
Unlike provincial and federal elections where voters cast one ballot, Brennan noted during municipal elections there are three being filled out — for mayor, city councillor and school trustee — which complicates the process.
Trending Now
Rogers outage lawsuit moving ahead, millions may get compensation
Poilievre defends RCMP comments, denies saying Trudeau should be in jail
“That is why Edmonton and Calgary moved decades ago to use vote tabulating machines — so that they wouldn’t have this problem.”
Elections Edmonton said the error was caught on Wednesday during the recount for ward sipiwiyiniwak.
“This re-counting process identified a discrepancy in the original advance vote preliminary results reported publicly and the re-counted results. It determined that there was a transposition error where some of the tally results were attributed to the wrong candidate,” the election organization said.
Friesen watched the recount happen and accepts what happened was human error.
Story continues below advertisement
“It doesn’t give me pause because I believe we got it right. I believe Thu was elected and she’ll serve well. She’ll be a great councillor for our ward,” Friesen said.
“It was a human administration error,” Parmar agreed. “And there’s so much fake news now about the counting of the ballots, but it actually wasn’t that.
“And we can’t judge on the error but we need to actually talk about the system — what failed in the system versus blaming the person, the people.”
Better Edmonton leader and mayoral candidate Tim Cartmell is calling for a third-party audit of the election. Brennan notes many of the issues in this election stem directly from provincial legislation changes.
“I think that we should be very clear that a lot of the problems that were caused in this election were caused by changes the UCP government made to the Local Authorities Election Act — for no reason.”
2:02
Slow results and long lines in 2025 Edmonton election
Global News spoke with an Edmonton Elections presiding deputy who has worked about a dozen civic, provincial and federal elections over the years. They said there wasn’t enough staff and the staff they did have were not trained properly before polls opened.
Story continues below advertisement
They said a big choke point on Monday night, that led to lengthy waits to vote, was the process of registering people in a new permanent voter registry. Each person took three to five minutes to register in the database the province required municipalities to create for this election. Brennan said it was unnecessary.
“There’s never been problems with elections fraud in Alberta, let alone at local elections. So they put in place a process to deal with something that didn’t exist. They put in a place a solution looking for a problem.
“They caused some of these problems.”
Brennan said Edmonton Elections also likely needed more staff in order to run the polling stations quicker, especially in light of the new steps that were required.
“Sure, there were problems, but here’s the beauty of it — the problems were caught.”
A review of the election will take place, Brennan said, either proactively by Edmonton Elections or at the direction of the new city council.
“When we get that review, we’ll be able to see what was done right, what was wrong, and what could be done better for 2029.”