EDMONTON — Posts questioning the results in Alberta’s referendum spread on the social media platform X this week as the numbers were released.
One claimed that hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots were dumped to answer just one of the questions put to voters — the 10th question asking about independence.
Another concluded more people had voted than the number of registered voters. Elections Alberta and one expert say the people making these claims either misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented the vote-counting process.
An Oct. 20 post on X alleged that hundreds of thousands of special ballots were dumped to tilt the outcome of the independence referendum question in favour of Alberta remaining in Canada.
“Look at the dump of mail in votes for the Alberta Referendum. Almost all ... the mail in ballots appear to only have answered question 10,” it said, posting screenshots of live preliminary results for each referendum question from the Elections Alberta site. The figures in the screenshot showed substantially more votes tallied for the independence question than for the others.
“That smells of corruption,” the post, which had received close to 67,000 views hours it was posted, continued.
Duane Bratt, a professor of political science at Mount Royal University in Calgary, described the claim about a mail-in ballot dump as “ridiculous.”
He said the sudden appearance of the results for the independence question after the polls closed was...
Community Notes, which allows users to contribute notes that add context or corrections to posts, was introduced by X in late 2022 and the same model is increasingly being adopted by other tech pl...