Expressing it as a percentage, voter participation in Monday’s Cochrane municipal election was down ten percentage points from 2022, dropping to a touch over 47%.
As clerk and returning officer Cassandra Child notes, however, in raw numbers, it’s up.
In 2022, there were just over three-thousand registered voters.
“In 2026, we had over 4,000 registered electors,” she says. “So when you apply those figures, there is an argument to be made that in 2026, our voter turnout was actually higher.”
Basic math confirms that. Monday’s participation was just under 1,900 voters, compared to just over 1,700 in the previous election.
In terms of efficiency counting and reporting votes, no town in our region can come close to Cochrane.
For the first time this year, it used no paper ballots, only internet and telephone voting.
“The counting process is minutes,” Child reports.
When eight o’clock arrived, it was verified that the phone line and online platform were shut down. Then the report was released.
“The whole process itself is less than half an hour, which is so efficient, right?” she remarks. “One of the benefits of telephone and internet voting.”
Child concedes that some people, however, were uncomfortable with not having a paper ballot on which to mark their X’s on at a physical polling place.
