Elections BC has denied Garry Begg's request for a recount in Surrey-Guildford, a riding lost by the NDP incumbent by just 103 votes to Conservative challenger Honveer Singh Randhawa.
Randhawa topped the polls in the riding by a narrow margin — 8,675 votes for Randhawa to Begg's 8,572, at last count, meaning the riding just missed the 100-vote threshold for an automatic recount, as is the case in Surrey City Centre, where the NDP's Amna Shah leads by just 95 votes.
Under B.C.'s Election Act, candidates or their official agents had until Tuesday (Oct. 22) to request a recount of some or all of the ballots considered at initial count.
A final count in B.C.'s tight election race will start Saturday, Oct. 26 and conclude Monday, Oct. 28.
Elections BC says the requested recount in Surrey-Guildford is among four in B.C. that did not meet requirements as defined by the province's Election Act.
"Under the Election Act," explains an Elections BC news release sent Thursday (Oct. 24), "these recount requests are accepted if there is evidence that votes were not correctly accepted or ballots were not correctly rejected, a ballot account does not accurately record the number of votes for a candidate, or the results of the quality assurance process indicate that vote-counting equipment did not process ballots accurately."
Also denied were recount requests in Courtenay-Comox, Maple Ridge East and Oak Bay-Gordon Head. A partial recount will happen in Kelowna Centre.
The B.C. election final count involves counting mail-in ballots, counting absentee ballots and recounts of ballots counted on election night.
After the final count, a judicial recount may occur if the difference between the top two candidates is less than 1/500th of the ballots cast. In Surrey-Guildford, with 18,395 votes in play, that would require a difference of less than 37 votes between the top two candidates for a judicial recount to occur.
Counting of mail-in ballots received after the close of advance voting will begin the morning of Saturday, Oct. 26, Elections BC says. Mail-in ballots received before the close of advance voting were counted on Oct. 19.
During the campaign, Randhawa said that if elected, his three main priorities are to stop SOGI, stop the indoctrination of our kids in schools, and immediately get Surrey hospitals built and expand school structures and remove portables.
The MLA-elect, who runs Randhawa Law Centre in Newton, is known "not just for his legal acumen, but for his unwavering dedication to fairness and accessibility to legal services," says a bio on on the Conservative party website.
Begg was first elected as the riding's NDP MLA in 2017, and he has held the riding ever since. A retired RCMP officer, Begg campaigned for votes in a battle with Randhawa, Manjeet Singh Sahota (BC Green Party) and Kabir Qurban (Independent).
