Alberta used to have the lowest voter turnout in Canada. Lately, it's near the top

Turnout in Alberta's 2023 election may have dipped slightly from the 2019 vote, but it was still well above the levels the province has seen in recent decades — making it an outlier in Canada.

Provincial and territorial elections in the rest of the country have seen generally declining turnouts since 1980.

In Alberta, however, the trend has been in the opposite direction since 2008.

Alberta has gone from having the lowest voter turnout in Canada 15 years ago to having among the highest in recent elections, according to data collected from electoral authorities across every province and territory.

Lisa Young, a political scientist with the University of Calgary, says Alberta has bucked the national trend for two main reasons: it was starting from a lower point, and elections in the province have become more competitive than they've been for a long, long time.

"What the research tells us is that competitive elections tend to drive up turnout," she said.

Upward trend, dip notwithstanding

Elections Alberta reports that 62.4 per cent of registered voters cast ballots in this year's vote, which is down from 67.5 per cent in the 2019 election.

But 2019 marked a high point for Alberta; turnouts were lower throughout the province's elections in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.

They bottomed out in 2008, when barely 40 per cent of registered voters cast ballots in that year's provincial election.

That marked the lowest turnout in any provincial or territorial election since at least 1980.

But things have changed — a lot — since then.

While turnout rates have trended downward in the rest of the country, Alberta's turnout has been generally heading upward.

Alberta's 67.5 per cent turnout in 2019 was the second-highest in any provincial or territorial election for the better part of the past decade.

Since 2017, only Prince Edward Island has recorded a higher turnout, with 77.7 per cent in its 2019 election and 68.5 per cent in its 2023 vote.

Meanwhile, Alberta's mark of 62.4 per cent in 2023 was ahead of turnouts in:

• The 2017 election in British Columbia (61.2%).
• The 2017 election in Nova Scotia (53.4%).
• The 2018 election in Ontario (56.7%).
• The 2019 election in Newfoundland and Labrador (60.2%).
• The 2019 election in Manitoba (55%).
• The 2019 election in the Northwest Territories (54%).
• The 2020 election in Saskatchewan (53.8%).
• The 2020 election in British Columbia (53.9%).
• The 2021 election in Newfoundland and Labrador (51.4%).
• The 2021 election in Nunavut (49.9%).
• The 2022 election in Ontario (44.1%).

Young said she was a little surprised to see Alberta's turnout decline slightly in 2023 relative to the previous election. 

"It was actually interesting to see a little bit of a dip from 2019," she said. "I would have guessed that it would have continued to go up, just because it was such a hotly contested election and so competitive."

'Habitual non-voters' vs. suddenly competitive politics

Young said the gradual decline in voter turnouts in the rest of Canada is, in part, connected to a shift in habits.

"What we've seen is that there's a tendency for younger people to be less likely to go out to vote," she said.

"Now, some of them, when they get older and more rooted in community, do start voting, but many don't. We've got a fairly substantial group of habitual non-voters, and so you're seeing that trend in most Canadian provinces."

She said Alberta has been different, however, largely because the politics have shifted so much in the province.

When Peter Lougheed's Progressive Conservatives won the 1971 election, it ended 36 years of Social Credit governments in Alberta.

The PCs went on to hold power for the next 44 years.

As a result, Young said, voter turnout in Alberta became "understandably low."

"There was very little sense that elections were likely to produce changes in government," she said.

But things started to shift in 2012, when the Wildrose led the PCs in the polls for a long time before ultimately collapsing in the final stage of the campaign.

And then, in 2015, a sea change occurred: the NDP's surprise win over the PCs and its right-wing rivals, the Wildrose. Since then, provincial politics have been competitive in a way that many Albertans had never previously experienced.

Nowhere was that more evident than in Calgary on Monday night, with ballot counting stretching into the wee hours of Tuesday morning, as races flipped back and forth between UCP and NDP candidates holding narrow leads.

The six closest ridings in the city were decided by a combined 851 votes, according to the final, unofficial counts from Elections Alberta.

Two of those ridings — Calgary-Glenmore (a 30-vote margin) and Calgary-Acadia (a seven-vote margin) — will be subject to automatic recounts.

Why did turnout dip in 2023?

Given how close things were expected to be — and turned out to be — Young was surprised the by the dip in turnout from 2019.

"As Alberta politics have become more competitive and unpredictable, turnout has steadily increased until this most recent election," she said.

Part of it may have been due to the sentiment among many voters that they were voting against a candidate, rather than for a candidate.

Nearly two-thirds of decided voters who responded to the Vote Compass online tool in the final days of the election campaign said they opted for their selected candidate "because the alternative is worse."

"What we did certainly hear from people was that they weren't enthusiastic about the choices available to them," said Young.

"There's also the question of whether there were voters who simply stayed home because they couldn't bring themselves to vote for either candidate. But this is just speculation. Without getting deeper into the data, we really can't know which of those explanations holds."

How the turnout data was gathered and interpreted

Turnout data was sourced from each province and is based on the proportion of registered voters who voted rather than the total number of eligible voters.

Many jurisdictions made changes to how they tabulate registered voters during the analysis period, which can cause the turnout rate to drop.

For example, British Columbia incorporated Elections Canada's National Register of Electors into its voters list ahead of the 2005 election, which added a significant number of electors to its list. Quebec added a permanent list register of voters in 1998, as did Northwest Territories in 2003, Saskatchewan in 2016 and Yukon in 2021.

In Nunavut, voters who are not on the voters list are able to register immediately before voting.

Up until 1996, voters in P.E.I. voted for both a councillor and assemblyperson. For simplicity, just the turnout for assemblyperson is displayed (turnout for each was similar).

Alberta's turnout data for 2023 is unofficial.