Election nights have changed, not for the better
By Lethbridge Herald on October 22, 2025.
Scott Sakatch
Herald Editor
At the risk of sounding like an old codger (yeah, I know, that ship sailed a long time ago), I can’t help waxing nostalgic whenever election time comes around. Back in the late 1990s-early 2000s, during my first go-round in journalism, election night was always an exciting time. We’d all come in later in the day because we knew we’d spend most of the night on the phones, tracking down results and talking to election officials and candidates in between bites of pizza, courtesy of the company. Reporters and editors would be in the newsroom until midnight, but the buzz of the evening often carried on long after we got home in the wee small hours.
I remember one election night in particular: Nov. 7, 2000, when George W. Bush faced off against then-Vice-President Al Gore for the U.S. presidency. As the night editor, I watched the results roll in from our wire service until the last possible minute, when Bush was declared the winner and Gore conceded. I threw the story and headline on the page and sent it to our back shop, who then sent it downstairs to the fellows in the press room. Exhausted, I drove home, flopped down in my easy chair and turned on the TV. In the time it took me to drive home, the major networks had switched their official stance and said the race was too close to call, and Gore had rescinded his concession. The race was still on.
I immediately drove back to the Herald, ran downstairs to the press and yelled at the top of my lungs (to be heard over the rattle and hum of the machines) that we had to change the front page. Fortunately, there’s something called the splice, when the press stops to feed in a new roll of newsprint, so I was able to change the front page from “Bush wins” to “Too close to call.” About half of our subscribers got the first version and half got the second. To the best of my knowledge, I’m the only person in the Herald’s 120-year history to ever yell “Stop the press!”
After I left journalism in 2006 and got involved in politics, I took part in the campaigning side of several elections, both provincial and municipal, as well as a couple of party nomination elections. In most of those, I also acted as a scrutineer. You may have heard that term before, particularly in last year’s U.S. presidential election when Donald Trump had “scrutineers” crawling around polling stations looking for “election fraud.”
To be very clear, that’s not what scrutineers do; the purpose of scrutineering is to see who has voted, compare it to a list of your candidate’s identified supporters, and discern whether all of those supporters have voted. When you find gaps (supporters who haven’t voted yet), you call them up and ask them if they still planned to vote, needed a ride, etc. to make sure you get every last one off our supporters to the polls.
After witnessing dozens if not hundreds of election workers in action over the space of a decade, I can say with certainty that they are people of the highest integrity, and they’re passionate about doing a good job. They don’t do it for the money; they do it because they’re (for lack of a better term) democracy nerds who revere the process and follow it to the letter.
As an example, I once saw someone innocently carry a handful of ballots in a nomination race from one table to another. The poor man was immediately beset by workers telling him to drop the ballots, as he wasn’t officially authorized to touch them. You’d have thought he was carrying a lit stick of dynamite, judging by the sheer passion of their reaction. To those workers, the ballots were absolutely sacred. And that wasn’t even an official election; it was just the nomination.
Fast forward 20 years since my last election as a journalist and things have changed a lot. As of this writing, we’re still waiting on official results of Monday’s municipal election because every ballot had to be hand-counted, thanks to changes the Danielle Smith government felt the need to add to Bill 20. Why? Because apparently, Smith et al believe the election process – the same one I’ve observed for more than 25 years now, the same one that was in place when they were all elected themselves – was open to voter fraud.
Insert eye-roll here.
It wasn’t the City of Lethbridge’s fault that results took forever, or that there were only three polling stations and you had to wait in line to vote. That lands squarely on the province, as does the colossal waste of taxpayer money to make it all happen in the name of “election security.”
Is it me, or is there a distinct pattern emerging of this government making pointless, expensive changes for no reason whatsoever? Election fraud, license plates, passports to renew your driver’s license, the travelling circus that was Alberta Next, where people on the public payroll felt the need to insult audience members, all the way up to changing the moratorium on coal mining and then paying out hundreds of millions in penalties to corporations as a result. I ask all of you to remember this when the next provincial election rolls around.
Of course, that election will take days to count as well. Best settle in for the long haul, folks.
14-13
Exactly ! We will this UCP clown car finally get run off the road !
i suppose the issue of election fraud blabbed about by the ucp is mostly a deflection of the instances of fraud that have been associated with the ucp.
as for elections losing their luster, if one has lived through so very many elections at each of our 3 levels of govt, and one has an open mind, it is difficult to not have become jaded and cynical. our democracy has become woefully eroded; change is just a stupid soundbite that somehow seems to buy votes, even though change is mostly superficial in our system; the masses continue to get ripped off, ground down, and have now adjusted to being the equivalent of indentured consumers, living off credit and losing wealth to the unscrupulous lenders; the uppermost of the top 1% are ever controlling more of the nation’s wealth, while the masses are ever losing control of the nation’s wealth; graft, nepotism, sleaze, corruption, ineptitude, and waste are ever present, no matter the name of the team voters have elected; further fomenting those issues is the fact that little to nothing in terms of real investigation and prosecution and recovery of public losses is ever done; first past the post denies us the basic principle of one vote for each voter in a multiparty system, and our vote further rendered near useless by gerrymandering and the likes lobbying that gives far more voice and preference to the wealthiest individuals and corps….these are just a quick selection of why it may be that elections hold so little excitement.
i still wonder why folk feel their illiterate x really makes much of a difference anymore. is it because they feel that is only way to maintain a democracy? and, yet, we hardly have much left of democracy; even the likes of oligarchical, dictatorial, fascist lands hold “elections”, such as do china, and did the old ussr. it is not the act of voting that really counts: it is the quality of the system that one’s vote upholds that is the true counter.