B.C.’s chief electoral officer Anton Boegman said a missing ballot box of approximately 861 votes that were not counted in the Oct. 19 provincial election was the result of a local team’s oversight.
The ballot box was used in advance voting polls in the Prince George-Mackenzie electoral district, Boegman said at a Nov. 5 news conference.
“After the first day of advanced voting, all ballots from that station, they were taken out of the tabulator ballot box, and they were securely stored in a sealed ballot box at the district office,” he said.
An error at that station led to a recount, during which Elections BC staff recounted the advance votes but overlooked the one box.
“When the election officials were re-tabulating the ballot box, they only included the ballots from the second day of advanced voting, from the day that the issue had occurred,“ he said. ”They should have also included the ballots that were in the sealed ballot box in the district office, but they did not, and that was an error of that team in that district.”
Boegman said the box should have been discovered when the local team was counting on election night while reconciling the number of voters with the number of ballots.
“This, again, was not done,” he said during the news conference.
The error was discovered when Elections BC was preparing for judicial recounts in the Kelowna Centre and Surrey-Guildford electoral districts
“When we did that audit of records, provincewide, of voters who voted against the number of votes that have been cast and reported, that’s when we discovered the issue, and that’s what prompted the district electoral officer to apply for a judicial recount on that box,” he said.
Boegman said Elections BC could not make the issue public until Nov. 4 due to a publication ban by the courts.
There were also 14 unreported votes in the Surrey-Guildford riding as a result of an election official’s data entry mistake, Boegman said in a Nov. 4 statement. It’s a riding that the BC NDP won by just 27 votes.
Other mistakes Elections BC found include out-of-district results that went unreported in five electoral districts, he said in the statement.
Elections BC said the missing votes were not significant enough to change the election outcome. The election saw a narrow win for the B.C. NDP, with 44.87 percent of the votes, against the B.C. Conservative Party, which had 43.27 percent of the votes.
In Prince George-Mackenzie as well as in the case of the unreported out-of-district results, the unreported votes represent less than 0.08 percent of all results reported, Elections BC said.
“These reporting omissions impact a small number of votes in 69 electoral districts but comprise only 0.05 percent of total votes in those districts,” Boegman said in the statement.
Elections BC said the province’s elections rely on the work of over 17,000 election officials from communities across the province and that “unfortunately, unintentional human errors do occur in administering the vote.”
The judicial recounts for Surrey-Guildford and Kelowna Centre are scheduled for Nov. 7 and 8.
John Rustad, leader of the B.C. Conservative Party, has called for an independent review into the incidents.
“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 said in a Nov. 4 X post.
“This is an unprecedented failure by the very institution responsible for ensuring the fairness and accuracy of our elections.”
The Canadian Press contributed to this report.
