Advance polls draw 3 times more voters than last Calgary election

Advance voting in Calgary's municipal election wrapped up Wednesday with unofficial figures indicating turnout was more than three times higher than the last election.

In seven days of advance voting, 74,965 ballots were cast, according to unofficial results released by Elections Calgary.

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In the 2013 election, 22,410 ballots were cast in early voting. In 2010, the final turnout at advance polls was 23,721.

The city says it will deploy extra resources to make sure the advance ballots don't slow down counting on election night.

Election manager Paul Denys says advance votes will be stored until Monday night, when those ballot boxes will be opened at a separate station, where the votes will be sorted and counted.

"We have surpassed all previous records for the city and I suspect the province as well," he said.

"That's why we have deployed additional resources to assist with the sorting, so that we can get to the counting faster."

Calgary is one of the last major cities in the country to still use paper ballots, so Denys says the counting can be time-consuming.

"When we have that much paper to go through and that many ballots to count, to make sure that they are double-counted and verified and everything is counted correctly and packaged correctly, it is a time-consuming exercise."

Denys says the city currently has no plans to bring in tabulators or electronic voting machines, which are used in many other cities.

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