FIRST BALLOT RESULTS COMING SOON IN CALGARY

Larry Johnsrude of the Edmonton Journals is blogging live from the floor of the "convention" (!) (?) (!) in Calgary, waiting for the results of the Alberta PC leadership election first ballot. Apparently Victor Doerksen has just arrived, one of the eight candidates.

I've been to three of these things myself in Ontario (two provincial and one at the federal Conservative leadership vote) and it's always pretty exciting waiting for the results to come in. From the sounds of it though, it looks as if these guys in Alberta are going to announce the results all at once, no partial returns, nothing! At least in Ontario they gave partial returns as the results became known, so that we workers didn't go nuts in the hall waiting for the final results to come in. At the last two leadership votes I attended, that was the case.

And the coverage from the mainstream media has been awful for this thing. Where's the press coverage? I'm tuning in to 660 News and they seem to have someone there, but there's no live coverage, no interviews going on, nothing! What a disgrace.

Now I'm hearing a report on QR77 that the party president walked into the hall and told the crowd it was taking longer than expected to count the ballot. I'm not surprised. That's exactly what happened in Ontario in 2004 with the PCs; we were almost up all night because the counting took so long.

More later.