British Columbia’s election agency says it has discovered that a ballot box containing 861 votes wasn’t counted in the recent provincial election, as well as other mistakes, including 14 votes going unreported in a crucial riding narrowly won by the NDP.
Elections BC says omission of the ballot box did not affect the result in Prince George-Mackenzie, while the unreported votes in Surrey-Guildford were discovered last week during preparations for a judicial recount in the riding, where Garry Begg’s 27-vote victory propelled the New Democrats to a one-seat majority government.
B.C.’s chief electoral officer, Anton Boegman, says in a statement that the discovery of the “anomaly” in the Surrey-Guildford count triggered a provincewide review.
This review, which started last Wednesday and ended Sunday, identified what the statement describes as “data entry omissions” that resulted in mistakes in the vote counts in 69 of the province’s 93 ridings.
The statement says the number of unreported votes in each district was small and did not affect the outcome in any of them, pending judicial recounts in Surrey-Guildford and Kelowna Centre.
It says a recount of the ballot box in Prince George-Mackenzie, which was easily won by B.C. Conservative Kiel Giddens, has been requested.
Conservative Party of B.C. Leader John Rustad Monday afternoon issued a statement in which he called the discovery an "unprecedented failure" by the "very institution" deemed responsible for the fairness and accuracy of elections.
"While I'm not disputing the final outcome pending remaining judicial recounts, it's clear that mistakes like these severely undermine public trust in our electoral process," Rustad said.
He added that British Columbians "deserve assurance" that every vote counts and that these errors are corrected.
"This is why I'm calling for an independent review to ensure that these types of mistakes never happen again," he said. "Democracy is too sacred to allow trust to erode to the lows we see today."
