Edmonton votes 2025: What we know so far

UPDATE (Oct. 21, 10:00pm): Andrew Knack is set to become Edmonton's 37th mayor, leading a council that will have many of the same people he served with previously, as well as a few members of the Better Edmonton party. Read the latest here

What Taproot knows about Edmonton's 2025 election so far is that voter turnout was just more than 30%, the lowest since 2007, that some voters waited until after 10pm to cast their ballots, and that as of 1:20am on Oct. 21, about 54,000 votes had come through.

Those results, preliminary as they are, show Andrew Knack leading in the race for mayor, that incumbents in council races are doing far better than some pundits expected, and that party-affiliated candidates are struggling to make headway.

The City of Edmonton said it would open no new ballot boxes after midnight on Oct. 20 and would stop hand-counting ballots at 1am on Oct. 21. It said counts will resume at 9am Tuesday, and that an unofficial result is expected before Oct. 22.

Here's a quick glimpse of the results so far.

Mayor

The race for mayor saw the first unofficial results come into Taproot's results dashboard just before 10:30pm. As Taproot went to press, the race appeared to be between Andrew Knack and Tim Cartmell, with Knack holding a rougly 4,900-vote advantage, with 48 of 236 polls reporting.

Both Knack, at 37.7%, and Cartmell, at 28.7%, had a significant lead over Michael Walters in third at 11.8%, with Omar Mohammad in fourth place at 10.8%. Rahim Jaffer was a distant fifth at 4.5%.

The race for mayor had 13 total candidates, including Paul Bakhmut, Ronald Stewart Billingsley, Jr, Tony Caterina, Abdul Malik Chukwudi, Vanessa Denman, Andy Andrzej Gudanowski, Utha Nadauk, and Olney Tugwell.

Council

Early results for council showed incumbents faring well in most wards, with a few exceptions.

• In Ward Anirniq, incumbent Erin Rutherford was leading her nearest competitor, Jesse Watson, by more than 600 votes, with six of 22 polls reporting.
• In Ward Dene, incumbent Aaron Paquette was leading challenger Banisha Sandhu by more than 2,000 votes, with 12 of 20 polls reporting.
• In Ward Ipiihkoohkanipiaohtsi, incumbent Jennifer Rice was trailing Jon Morgan by just seven votes, with two of 21 polls reporting.
• In Ward Karhiio, incumbent Keren Tang had more than double the votes of challenger Joti Buttar, with eight of 22 polls reporting.
• In Ward Métis, incumbent Ashley Salvador was leading challenger Caroline Matthews by about 900 votes, with seven of 25 polls reporting.
• In Ward Nakota Isga, Better Edmonton candidate Reed Clarke lead by 540 votes over challenger Rajah Maggay, with three of 22 polls reporting.
• In Ward O-day'min, incumbent Anne Stevenson was leading challenger Stephen Hammerschmidt by nearly 800 votes, with three of 19 polls reporting.
• In Ward papastew, incumbent Michael Janz had a significant lead, with more than three times the number of votes as his nearest challenger, with nine of 20 polls reporting.
• In Ward pihêsiwin, new candidate Jackie Liu was ahead of Michael Elliott by just six votes, with two of 20 polls reporting.
• In Ward sipiwiyiniwak, Better Edmonton candidate Darrell Friesen lead challenger Giselle Quezon General — who also ran in 2021 — by about 120 votes, with four of 23 polls reporting.
• In Ward Sspomitapi, incumbent Jo-Anne Wright was leading Harman Singh Kandola by about 400 votes, with three of 21 polls reporting.
• In Ward tastawiyiniwak, incumbent and Better Edmonton candidate Karen Principe had a strong lead, with roughly the same number of the votes as all her challengers received combined, with six of 23 polls reporting.

For the full list of results, including for school board trustee races, see Taproot's 2025 election results dashboard.

A slow-motion election

Results did not start to drip out of the City of Edmonton until 10:26pm on Oct. 20, or roughly two hours after Edmonton voters knew the unofficial results in 2021.

The wait for numbers largely echoed what some shared they had experienced at voting stations.

"As I was leaving the polling place after 8pm there was an hour's worth of people still in line," wrote Michael DeMoor, a dean at The King's University in Edmonton.

Changes to election laws created by the United Conservative Party government through Bill 20 and other changes to the Local Authorities Election Act meant every vote will have to be counted by hand. The UCP government also mandated that advance voting was limited to five days in 2025, as compared to 10 days of advance voting Edmonton held in 2021.

"The vote count for mayor alone at my local polling station took almost two hours," one person said on social media.

Official results will be released at 12pm on Oct. 24, as required by provincial law.

The city said in a news release that it will publish results online once all of the ballots for each race are counted at each voting location.

Some preliminary results were available on Oct. 20, but the City anticipated that the full preliminary count would not be completed until Oct. 21.

Edmonton Elections said unofficial voter turnout was 205,758, or 30.3% of 679,830 eligible voters. That's the lowest turnout since 2007, when 27.24% of eligible voters cast ballots.

With files from Mariam Ibrahim and Mack Male.