Election results aren't expected to drag into the night when Manitobans go to the polls in the provincial election on Oct. 3.

Manitobans should have election results more quickly than Albertans did on May 29, thanks to electronic voting machines that are expected to spit out results within about an hour of polls closing, an election official said.

But that doesn't mean every ballot will be tabulated in around an hour, Elections Manitoba Chief Electoral Officer Shipra Verma said of the non-partisan government agency's "internal target."

These vote counting machines are expected to count more than 90 per cent of the votes cast during the advance voting period and 85 per cent of the votes cast on election day, Verma said. The ballots cannot be counted until the polls close at 8 p.m.

The remaining votes, which will continue to be counted manually, could take around two hours, Verma said.

That's still quicker than Alberta's results were counted during its provincial election earlier this week.

Only a small fraction of results were available 90 minutes after polls closed. At some points, a candidate was shown as leading in a riding despite only having a single vote.

An Elections Alberta official said a change in how advance "vote anywhere" ballots are counted likely contributed to a delay in publishing the results.

As seen in Alberta, Manitoba is also using electronic vote-counting machines for the first time, after passing legislation to that effect last year. Voters will continue to fill out paper ballots, but the machines will be a faster alternative to counting by hand. The results generated by the machines must still be verified by humans.

The City of Winnipeg has already been using the machines.

Verma said a faster timeline for counting ballots is the goal, but plans could still go awry.

"We are focusing significantly on training our staff because these processes are new. We have around 7,000 people to work for us and it's a very short timespan where we hired them, trained them, introduced them to the technology," she said.

They're working on contingency plans in case issues arise, Verma said.

Recent provincial byelections in Kirkfield Park and Fort Whyte, which were both tight races, took more than three hours for unofficial final results to be posted.

Verma said it isn't practical to have electronic vote counting in every location. There are technological limitations in some areas and it is cost-prohibitive to have it in every location, such as voting places, like senior residences with fewer than 100 units, in which the number of ballots cast will be small. Absentee, homebound and personal security ballots will also be counted manually.

Elections Manitoba has recently been providing demonstrations to stakeholders, including political parties and academics, to explain the new vote-counting process, Verma said. Media is scheduled to be invited to a demonstration next week.