More than 165,000 elementary and high school students participated in the Student Vote program for the 2019 Alberta provincial election.
After learning about democracy and informed citizenship, researching the parties and platforms, and debating the future of Alberta, students cast ballots for the official candidates running in their school’s electoral division.
As of 4:00 p.m. yesterday afternoon, 1,229 schools had reported their election results, representing all 87 electoral divisions in the province. In total, 165,527 ballots were cast by student participants; 159,197 valid ballots, 4,417 rejected ballots and 1,913 declined ballots.
“CIVIX would like to thank all participating educators, and their students, for their enthusiasm and dedication to this exercise,” said Taylor Gunn, President of CIVIX. “We are sincerely grateful to Elections Alberta, The Alberta Teachers’ Association, the Edmonton Community Foundation, the Calgary Foundation, Alberta Education and the Government of Canada for making this project possible.”
Students elected Jason Kenney and the United Conservative Party to form a majority government with 49 out of 87 seats and 36.1 per cent of the vote. Kenney also won in his electoral division of Calgary—Lougheed with 54.4 per cent of the vote.
Rachel Notley and the Alberta New Democratic Party took 35 seats and will form the official opposition, receiving 30.3 per cent of the popular vote. Notley won in her electoral division of Edmonton—Strathcona with 52.1 per cent of the vote.
Stephen Mandel and the Alberta Party won 3 seats and received 18.5 per cent of the vote. Mandel was defeated in his electoral division of Edmonton—McClung.
Despite receiving 5.3 per cent of the vote, the Alberta Liberal Party did not win any seats. Leader David Khan was defeated in his electoral division of Calgary—Mountain View.
This is the fourth provincial-level Student Vote project conducted in Alberta. In the 2015 provincial election, 92,000 Alberta students participated from 800 schools.
The Student Vote Alberta 2019 online results platform presents the province-wide results, as well as results for each electoral division and for each individual school.
VIEW COMPLETE RESULTS HERE: http://studentvote.ca/results/ab2019
RESULTS HIGHLIGHTS:
The electoral division of Calgary—Acadia had the greatest number of participants with 4,005 valid Student Vote ballots cast. Calgary—Varsity was second with 3,765 valid votes, followed by Calgary—McCall with 3,194 valid votes.
The electoral division of Drumheller—Stettler had 30 schools report results – more than any other electoral division.
BACKGROUND:
Student Vote is the flagship program of CIVIX, a national civic education charity dedicated to developing the habits of active and informed citizenship among young people. Since 2003, CIVIX has coordinated 42
Student Vote projects at various levels of elections.
Other CIVIX programming includes government budget consultations with youth (Student Budget Consultation), coordinated visits between students and their elected representatives (Rep Day), a news literacy program for students (NewsWise) and professional development opportunities for teachers (Democracy Bootcamp).
The Student Vote project for the 2019 Alberta provincial election was made possible by Elections Alberta, The Alberta Teachers’ Association, the Edmonton Community Foundation, the Calgary Foundation, Alberta
Education and the Government of Canada.
