Just an hour after polls closed, results begin to fill the voting grid on the Elections Alberta website on the Fort McMurray-Lac La Biche constituency's by-election night. The votes are coming in from 63 area polling stations across the massive jurisdiction that has a physical size of 32,000 square kilometres and a population of about 45,000.
The number of eligible voters in the constituency, according to Elections Alberta is 24,048, which is down about 1,500 from the 2019 provincial election.
Across the area, the number of eligible voters at each polling station ranges from just 32 at Beaver Lake Cree Nation, 48 at Heart Lake Cree Nation and 75 in Janvier to 795 in the Cedar Woods and Silversprings areas of Fort McMurray and 767 in rural Plamondon. According to Elections Canada, there are 370 eligible voters in the Kikino Metis Settlement, 721 at Buffalo Lake Metis Settlement and 341 in the Hylo area.
Of the constituencies total eligible voters, approximately 8,000 are in the southern two-thirds of the riding with the remaining 16,000 in the Fort McMurray area.
Where they are at
An hour and a half after the polls closed, the gradually-filling rows of polling station by polling station are showing the UCP's Brian Jean with a considerable lead, taking two thirds of the 3700 votes tabulated. The NDP's Ariana Mancini is second with 16 per cent of the votes so far and the Wildrose Indpendence's Paul Hinman is in third place with 12 per cent of the early count votes. None of the other five candidates have yet to reach more than two percent of the early vote count.
We'll update again in an hour ...
