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It typically takes up to two weeks to completely finalize the results of a B.C. province election. But not since 1952 has a result been so close that the winner hung in the balance.
And this count carried the added complexity of a mass of uncounted mail-in ballots that was first estimated at 49,000, but whose final tally would end up coming to 66,074.
In the province’s 2001 election, there were some seats whose results remained undecided for more than two months after voting day. At the last election, held in 2020, the final Elections BC count wasn’t published until Nov. 8, more than two weeks after that year’s Oct. 24 vote.
But in both of those races, the winner won by a wide enough margin that victory could be declared even with a few seats still hanging in the balance.
The 2001 result, in particular, saw the B.C. Liberals capture 77 of 79 seats; the final tally only served to figure out if the B.C. NDP would hold enough seats to retain official party status (they didn’t).
That’s not the case this time. On the morning after the vote, Elections BC announced that it had tallied 99.72 per cent of the more than two million ballots cast.
But with early counts showing 46 ridings leading BC NDP and 45 leading BC Conservative, any declaration of a winner needed to await a final tally — as well as recounts in particularly close ridings.
The ridings of both Surrey-City Centre and Juan de Fuca-Malahat triggered official recounts once early results showed the top two candidates within 100 votes of each other.
It hasn’t been since the 1950s that British Columbians have gone to the polls only to be plunged into a lengthy odyssey of not knowing who their next government will be.
And the 1952 example was further complicated by the fact that it was the first to operate on a system of ranked balloting — an electoral system that B.C. would use just once more before it was scrapped in favour of the current first past the post system.
As such, election workers not only needed to count the ballots, but to manually perform the necessary calculations required of the new “instant-runoff voting” system.
Despite the vote being held on June 12, it wouldn’t be until July that the shock winner was announced as B.C.’s new Social Credit Party.
This latest election wasn’t nearly as complicated, but it did carry the unique factor of potentially being swung by uncounted mail-in ballots.
Mail-in ballots have long been a component of B.C. elections, but their prevalence surged dramatically with the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2017, just 6,517 votes were from mail-in ballots, this rose to 596,287 in the 2020 election.
On the morning after the vote, Elections BC announced that it had 49,000 uncounted absentee and mail-in ballots that would factor into the final count.
Four days later, on Oct. 24, that estimate was raised to “approximately 65,000 ballots.” And in a final Oct. 25 breakdown of “certification envelopes to be considered at final count,” the uncounted ballots stood at 66,074.
Elections BC explained the increase by saying that the initial estimate was based on the number of “screened” votes in their system.
Mail-in ballots aren’t declared eligible until the voter’s information is cross-referenced to “ensure that the voter was eligible to vote and did not vote previously.” On the day after the election, the agency had about 49,000 screened ballots in their system, with the extra four days yielding another 17,000 passing muster. “Further screening has occurred (since Oct. 20) which is why the number has increased,” said the agency in a statement.
And while Elections BC does know the number of ballots it mailed out, not all of them arrived by the 8 p.m. deadline on voting day — and not all of them passed certification. In 2020, for instance, Elections BC issued 724,279 vote by mail packages, but only 596,287 became eligible votes.
Nevertheless, suspicion about the 17,000 new ballots was a big part of why the term “Elections BC” was trending on X.com throughout Sunday and Monday.
On Sunday, Aisha Estey, president of the B.C. Conservative Party, issued a post saying that she had confidence in the mail-in ballot count.
“I spent the last two days in a warehouse watching the transcription and counting of mail in ballots. Elections BC staff have been working tirelessly and doing their best within the confines of the legislation that governs their work,” she wrote.
Estey added “would we have liked mail-ins to be counted closer to E-Day? Sure. But I saw nothing that caused me concern.”
