British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Kevin Loo is sitting at a desk in a rented warehouse, the rafters still decorated with pink yarn and pompoms from a recent party, listening to lawyers for the provincial New Democrats and Conservatives argue over the intention of the voter who cast a ballot in last month’s election from a nearby retirement home.
The NDP lawyer maintains the voter mistakenly put a diagonal line in the rival party candidate’s circle before clearly writing a deeper “Y” for yes beside her party’s incumbent in Surrey-Guildford. The Conservative lawyer counters that the twin scratches mean the voter selected both the NDP and the Conservative candidates and therefore their ballot should be rejected.
Justice Loo orders a brief recess to weigh the arguments for and against accepting this and one other ballot, then spins his desk chair around to confer with the clerk at the table behind him. Ten minutes later, Justice Loo summons back the “court” and vetoes both ballots.
For two days, judges, lawyers for both parties and Elections BC officials have carefully scrutinized the ballots in this and one other riding as part of a judicial recount necessary because the results of the election three weeks ago were so tight. On Friday, the recount increased NDP candidate Gary Begg’s win by one ballot, meaning he won the Surrey-Guildford seat by 22 votes, securing a majority government for the NDP.
A judicial recount in Prince George-Mackenzie, called after a box of uncounted ballots was discovered, increased the Conservative candidate’s winning margin to more than 6,000 votes. The recount in Kelowna-Centre increased the Conservative candidate’s lead by two votes to 40.
As long as no party files a successful appeal of these audits by next Tuesday, B.C. will finally know what its government looks like: The NDP with a bare majority of 47 seats, the BC Conservatives with 44 and the Green Party with two.
Despite the careful process – one expert called Canada’s electoral system one of the best in the world – Elections BC reported this week that some 1,641 ballots were missed. About half of those were from the box in Prince George-Mackenzie. The missed ballots represent a tiny fraction of the 2.1 million votes cast.
But with only some 400 votes making the difference between an NDP and a Conservative government, it was, nonetheless, an embarrassing oversight.
The disclosure has put the electoral process under scrutiny.
Conservative Leader John Rustad, his campaign manager, Angelo Isidorou, and their party president, Aisha Estey, all initially endorsed the electoral process and the agency behind it.
“I accept the results of this election. I thank our Elections BC workers for their hard and dedicated work,” Mr. Rustad posted on X on Oct. 28 after the final count.
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But their acceptance of the outcome prompted intense blowback on social media from BC Conservative supporters who insisted that the NDP had cheated.
Mr. Rustad’s tone changed this week after Elections BC announced the missed ballots. Now he wants an independent review into what he called “an unprecedented failure” by the non-partisan agency responsible for administering elections in B.C.
“If people lose faith or confidence in our elections and our electoral system, then what’s left? That leads to a place that I don’t want to see British Columbia go to,” Mr. Rustad said in an interview on Wednesday. “Obviously I’m not happy with a number of things that have gone on with Elections BC, but I have to accept the results.”
Besides the ballot box in Prince George, Elections BC also found five ridings had failed to process out-of-district ballots, a total of 780 votes spread out over 69 ridings. None of the votes, which have since been added, changed the results.
NDP Leader David Eby said he remains confident about the election results, but proposed an all-party committee of the legislature to examine the process and to recommend improvements for future elections.
NDP MLA-elect Ravi Kahlon, who served as a lead troubleshooter in the previous NDP cabinet, said there can be room for improvement, but politicians need to be careful not to undermine the system.
“It’s important for all elected officials to be part of ensuring that the system works, and protecting it,” he said. “It’s fundamental to our democracy, and we’ve seen in the case of down south that it unravels really quickly if that’s not the case.”
Mr. Kahlon was referring to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, when then-president Donald Trump falsely claimed his loss to Joe Biden was the result of widespread fraud in multiple states that he had lost.
As he watched Surrey-Guildford’s judicial recount Thursday at the rented warehouse, B.C. Chief Electoral Officer Anton Boegman praised district election officials for their diligence but noted they are also capable of human errors such as the one that has drawn criticism in the past week.
He said he knows a number of his American colleagues who didn’t feel safe enough to work in this week’s presidential election.
“A number of them have retired and are not working in the field any more because of how the misinformation and disinformation about those election results resulted in a lot of physical security threats being made against them,” said Mr. Boegman, adding he is not aware of any similar threats to him or his staff in B.C.
His predecessor Keith Archer said the scrutiny in B.C.’s latest election is intensified simply because of the close result, not because the process is flawed.
“In a business that is conducted once every four years, by employees almost all of whom work for the election agency for about a week, the risk of errors occurring is present,” he said in an interview.
Holly Ann Garnett is co-director of the Electoral Integrity Project, a global network of academics and practitioners that engages in empirical research, publicly accessible data collection and stakeholder engagement on issues relating to election quality around the world.
She said that what’s happened in the Oct. 19 election in B.C. is an example of why Canada’s elections are ranked among the best in the world for integrity.
“It sounds very much like all of the safeguards that were in place were working as intended,” said Prof. Garnett, who teaches political science at both the Royal Military College of Canada and at Queen’s University.
“Elections are one of the largest mobilizations of the citizenry in peacetime. It’s a huge undertaking and, when irregularities happen, or when physical errors happen, we have a very strong system of adjudication that’s able to help mitigate those challenges.”