Corrections

The ledger

1. 0002 A mechanics row said mail-in ballots were not permitted; voting by mail was permitted, and about 658,000 Albertans used it The order says the referendum “is not to be conducted by mail-in ballot” and, in the same sentence, that this does not prevent voting by a Special Ballot — which is how an Alberta elector votes by mail. The row paraphrased the clause and lost the exception. ~658,000 special ballots requested against 59,000 in 2023. The page also never carried the application deadline, which was moved up from October 9 to September 25 while the page was live and wrong. Applied 2026-09-302026-09-30
   Reader-facing · quotation
2. 0001 The dissent rate was divided by a denominator that included non-votes Recorded absences and pairings are rows in the source table but are not votes cast. The headline figure was understated by about a fifth — 0.120% published, 0.143% correct. It was also converting a difference in attendance into an apparent difference in independence between two parties. Applied 2026-08-122026-08-06
   Headline · arithmetic

Two entries, on a site nobody has been told about yet. 0001 was filed the day the process was written. 0002 was filed because a headline in this project’s own daily feed contradicted a page this project had published eight days earlier.

It took six days to finish. The front page and /design were corrected the night of the discovery; /discipline, generated from twelve queries that all shared the fault, served the withdrawn denominator under a banner saying so until 2026-08-12, when its generator was rebuilt over votes cast. Under rule 07 no date was ever promised. The correction record carries what the rebuild found along the way, including one mislabelled figure inside the record itself.

The other ledger

A correction is this site being wrong. A dispute is the record not being one thing.

The two sit on the same layer and are deliberately kept apart. A correction has a right answer that this site failed to reach, and it closes when it is fixed. A dispute is two or more citable sources — at least one of them an organ of the Canadian state — publishing accounts that cannot all be complete. This site has no standing to say which is true, does not try, and says so on the page.

The first one is dispute 0001: five published accounts of how the maple leaf lost two points between October 1964 and February 1965, crediting three different people. The Senate of Canada says a wind tunnel. The department responsible for the flag does not mention one.

How this works

The rules, before there is any pressure on them.

Written now, while there is nothing at stake, because a corrections process first used under pressure is not a process. It is a press release.

1. Every correction is permanent and numbered. Entries are never deleted, never renumbered, never silently amended. If a correction is itself wrong, that gets its own number and both stay up.
2. The withdrawn figure is shown at the size it was published at. Struck through, beside its replacement, on the same page. A correction set in smaller type than the error is a retraction pretending to be a footnote.
3. Corrections are counted, never scored. There is no accuracy rating, no health score, no single number summarising how honest this site is. Counts can be checked; a score is an opinion with a decimal point, and it would be the easiest thing here for an opponent to attack.
4. The query that produced the wrong number is published beside the right one. Both, in full, runnable against the same hashed snapshot. A correction you cannot reproduce is an assurance, not a correction.
5. How the error was found is part of the record. Found by us, or reported by a reader, or forced by someone who disagreed with the result. Named where the finder wants to be named. The useful measure of this site is not how few corrections it has, but how many were found here rather than by someone else.
6. Near misses are filed too. Errors caught in draft, before publication, are recorded on the correction they were caught during. A page that only admits the mistakes that escaped is not being honest about how mistakes work.
7. No service-level promise. There is deliberately no published target for how fast a correction gets resolved. A stranger who wanted to make this site look negligent could simply file enough reports to breach it. What is published instead is the count still standing, and the age of the oldest one.
8. The record is a file, not a page. Each correction is a JSON document with a SHA-256 over its exact bytes as served. The HTML is a rendering. Anyone can verify the record independently of how it happens to look today.