Under the current rules in Alberta elections, a non-citizen who shows accepted ID for name and address and signs a declaration claiming to be a Canadian citizen can receive a ballot and vote. Officials do not require a passport, birth certificate, citizenship card, or other proof of citizenship at the polling station. Yes, it's illegal for a non-citizen to vote. But, it's possible. Any one of the 690,000 temporary or permanent non-citizen residents of Alberta (about 13.5 percent of the population!) can simply sign a form declaring they're a citizen, and show some kind of government ID. And if they're at a supportive living facility, long-term care facility, shelter, or community support centre who vote at a mobile station, they don't even need to show ID at all, as long as they “are acknowledged by an official of the facility to be resident or receiving services and are not required to show any identification. They are deemed resident in the electoral division in which the facility is located." Elections Alberta says non-citizen voting is exceptionally rare, but that claim rests only on cases it has caught. Since 2013 it reports six incidents of voter fraud in all provincial elections, and only two or three of those involved someone who was not eligible to vote, including an American permanent resident fined for voting in 2019. But again, those are only the ones who were caught. Poll workers do not check citizenship. A non-citizen can show an Alberta driver’s licence or other ordinary ID, sign a declaration that they are a citizen, and receive a ballot. Elections Alberta does not match the list of people who voted against immigration records or the new citizenship marker on provincial ID. A non-citizen who is not reported never appears in the count, so “exceptionally rare” describes detected cases, not the number of illegal votes. You would think that every single self-attestation of citizenship would be investigate, confirmed, and verified after each election. But as far as I can see, that is simply not the case. Not provincially. In fact, the opposite is true. Any self-attestation of Canadian citizenship is simply taken at face value. The name is automatically added to the provincial Permanent Register of Electors. Stop and think about that. A non-citizen under the current system can declare himself a citizen, vote in an election, and in effect add himself to the Permanent Register of Electors. It's illegal. It's wrong. It's immoral. But it's possible. And as far as I can tell, there is no way of us knowing if it has ever happened, or to what extent it has happened. So here is the question: does our current system allow for the possibility that a significant number of non-eligible voters could actually change the outcome of an election? And would we ever know? I hope I'm wrong. But from what I see of the process, these are the questions that are weighing on me.