After recounts in close races, Elections BC, a non-partisan agency, identified data entry omissions in five electoral districts, but none of those errors was significant enough to change the election outcome.CHAD HIPOLITO/The Canadian Press
Elections BC is seeking a third judicial recount in the recent provincial vote after discovering that hundreds of ballots in one riding were not counted or reported on election night, though the move will not affect the race’s final outcome.
Conservative Leader John Rustad on Monday called for an independent review into the results of the Oct. 19 election after the agency’s revelation that a ballot box containing 861 votes was not counted in Prince George-Mackenzie. The riding’s Conservative candidate, Kiel Giddens, is ahead of his closest rival by more than 5,000 votes.
Chief Electoral Officer Anton Boegman announced the finding of the missing ballot box in a statement, saying the discovery was made through the agency’s own internal review process and that the results are being corrected.
“Our elections rely on the work of over 17,000 election officials from communities across the province. Unfortunately, unintentional human errors do occur in administering the vote,” he said Monday.
But Mr. Rustad called the missing votes “an unprecedented failure” by Elections BC.
“While I am not disputing the final outcome pending remaining judicial recounts, it’s clear that mistakes like these severely undermine public trust in our electoral process,” he wrote on X.
“At a time when confidence in election integrity is more fragile than ever before, British Columbians deserve assurance that every vote counts and that these errors are corrected.”
After recounts in close races, Elections BC, a non-partisan agency, identified data entry omissions in five electoral districts, but none of those errors was significant enough to change the election outcome. Those omissions include 14 previously uncounted votes in Surrey-Guildford, which was the closest of 93 electoral races in the election.
The B.C. election delivered a virtual tie between the Conservatives and NDP. Based on current results, the NDP have secured a bare majority with 47 seats, the Conservatives 44 and the Greens two.
The seat distribution could yet change, as there are two judicial recounts in ridings where the two major parties are barely separated: in Kelowna Centre, Conservative Kristina Loewen is ahead by just 38 votes; in Surrey-Guildford, New Democrat Garry Begg holds the lead by 27 votes.
Also on Monday, Elections BC updated campaign finance figures, which provides a publicly funded allowance to parties based on a per-vote formula. Because of the Conservative breakthrough, at 43.2 per cent of the vote, the party will receive almost $1.7-million annually from taxpayers starting in 2025 – just $62,000 less than the NDP, at 44.9 per cent of the vote. The Greens, at 8.2 per cent of the vote, will get an allowance of $321,000.
The Conservative figure is a significant boost from past years: the party took less than 2 per cent of the vote in the 2020 provincial election and collected just $64,000 annually based on those results. Mr. Rustad had complained on the eve of the election campaign that the subsidy, which was introduced to offset strict new political fundraising limits in 2017, gave the NDP an unfair advantage.
“The NDP have rigged the election rules, they have actually given themselves a $2-per-vote subsidy for every vote they got in the last election, every year,” Mr. Rustad told reporters on Sept. 20.