Forever Canadian chair Thomas Lukaszuk claims Alberta's requirement to hand count referendum ballots means Elections Alberta has been "set up for failure." The evidence doesn't support that conclusion.

Lukaszuk argues that manually counting ballots across Alberta will create major problems when referendum votes are counted this October.

That prediction overlooks one important fact: Alberta has already conducted elections using manual ballot counts.

Most recently, Alberta municipalities were required to return to hand counting paper ballots after the province prohibited electronic vote tabulators.

Municipalities warned the process would require more workers, more time and higher costs, but the elections proceeded, and official results were produced. Hand counting was unquestionably more labour intensive, but it did not produce the widespread electoral breakdown Lukaszuk now predicts.

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In fact, hand counting paper ballots remains common. Alberta itself has historically hand counted most ballots, and even when tabulators were introduced for some advance polls in the 2023 provincial election, Elections Alberta continued to manually count Election Day, special and mobile ballots.

Has Mayor Jeromy Farkas already been campaigning against separation?

The debate is whether using an official mayoral platform for those messages constitutes campaigning under Alberta's referendum rules or merely political speech by an elected official.https://t.co/pQ8tqbhhDU

— Alberta Fact Check (@AB_FactCheck) July 3, 2026

Manual counting is slower than electronic tabulation, but it is not evidence that an election cannot be administered.

Lukaszuk appears to equate increased workload with electoral failure. Taking longer to count ballots is not the same as being unable to count them accurately.

Alberta municipalities have already held hand counted elections under the current rules, resulting in his federal allies becoming mayors of Edmonton and Calgary.

And that seemed good enough at the time.