The mechanics list on /alberta/referendum said “Mail-in ballots — Not permitted.” The order it cited 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.” A Special Ballot is how an Alberta elector votes by mail. About 658,000 Albertans requested one, and the page was wrong about it for the eight days that mattered most.
01 — The record
02 — The clause
O.C. 110/2026 and O.C. 160/2026, s. 5, in full:
“the referendum is not to be conducted by mail-in ballot, which does not prevent advance voting as defined in the Election Act, or voting by a Special Ballot or a Secure Special Ballot as provided for in the Election Act.”
The subject of the prohibition is the conduct of the referendum — it is not an all-mail vote, the way a mail-in plebiscite would be. It is not a prohibition on an elector voting by mail, and the same sentence says so. The page’s own next row already carried the correct fact: advance voting, Special Ballots and Secure Special Ballots are preserved. Two rows contradicted each other and shipped anyway.
Elections Alberta states it plainly, on the referendum section of its own site: “Electors may choose to vote in any provincial electoral event by mail.”
03 — The count
| Figure | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Special ballot requests, 2026 referendum | ~658,000 | Elections Alberta release, 2026-09-28 |
| Special ballot requests, 2023 provincial general election | a bit over 59,000 | Elections Alberta spokesperson, same release |
| Ratio, as stated by Elections Alberta | “a bit over 11 times” | not our arithmetic |
| Approved for fulfilment and mailing | more than 82% | of requests |
| Rejected at application or on return | 0.7% | of requests |
| Returned and approved, marked as voted | nearly 100,000 | as at 2026-09-28 |
| Applications still to process | about 35,000 | as at 2026-09-28 |
These are the agency’s own figures, quoted at the precision the agency used. They are approximate because the last pre-deadline requests were still being entered when the release went out, and they will move. No percentage here is of our own making, and none of them is combined with any other into a single number.
04 — The deadline the page never mentioned
A page whose stated purpose is to tell a reader what a ballot does and how to cast one had a deadline change inside its subject and did not carry the deadline at all. That omission is the larger fault of the two. The wrong sentence could be argued about; the missing date could not be acted on.
05 — What produced it
The page was built by reading the three orders in council directly and quoting them — which is the right method, and is why every ballot question on it is exact. The failure was in the one place the method was relaxed: a row that summarised an order instead of quoting it. “Not permitted — both s. 5.1 orders exclude conduct by mail-in ballot” is a paraphrase, and the paraphrase lost the exception.
The check that would have caught it did not exist: nothing compared the page’s mechanics against the operating rules published by the body actually running the vote. The orders say what is permitted. Elections Alberta says what is happening. The page consulted only the first.
What follows from that, and is now the rule for this class of page: where an administering body publishes its own operating page for an event, that page is a required second source for every mechanic, and the mechanic quotes rather than summarises.
06 — What changed
Was
Mail-in ballots — Not permitted. Both s. 5.1 orders exclude conduct by mail-in ballot (s. 5).
Is
Voting by mail — Permitted, and closed. The orders say the referendum “is not to be conducted by mail-in ballot” — meaning it is not an all-mail vote — and the same clause adds that this “does not prevent advance voting … or voting by a Special Ballot or a Secure Special Ballot.” Requests closed September 25, 2026, moved up from October 9. Completed packages are due by 5:00 pm, October 16, 2026.
Two rows were added rather than one: the request volume, and the deadlines. The “before October 19” list now tells a reader holding a ballot when it has to arrive, which is the only actionable thing on the page for the roughly 558,000 people whose ballots had not yet been returned when the agency last counted.
07 — What this does not claim
This correction fixes a statement about permission and dates. It makes no claim about turnout, and the request figures must not be read as one: a request is not a returned ballot, and nearly 100,000 of the 658,000 had been returned and approved when the agency last spoke. Whether eleven times the 2023 volume reflects interest in the questions, the removal of the reason-required rule that Elections Alberta itself credits, a campaign, or all three, is not something this site knows, and it is not going to guess on a page that exists to stop guessing.
The binding analysis on /alberta/referendum is untouched by this record. Six of ten results bind nobody, by the government’s own instruments; that came from quoting s. 4 of each order, and s. 4 was quoted correctly.
