The headline for the Calgary Election should be “Dollars don’t buy you Votes”

Another predicable boring election is over in Calgary – other than Helene Larocque being voted out of my former Ward, the rest of the results I mostly don’t care about. But there were some good signs – voter turnout up to 33%, still dismal but not the pathetic last election turnout of 20%.

The story of this election is that 19 year old Jeremy Zhao spending a total of $1853 gets 8007 votes (unofficial City of Calgary numbers) – good enough for 5th out of 9 candidates while Alnoor Kassam spends around $1.2mil and gets 35443 votes. Bronco still won by a large margin, at 128111 votes, 61% of the vote.

The big deal is, when you do the math, Alnoor spent a whopping $33.85 per vote received, Jeremy spend 23 cents per vote. Bronco comes in at $7.81 per vote – I am assuming here that he spent about a $mil for his campaign, and Alnoor was at $1.2mil for his campaign. Jeremy, as per his website is at $1853 – the only website I could quickly find his donator list and spending easily. It would seem Jeremy is the only one that gets that open accountability promises start with how you run your campaign.

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