A judicial recount in one of the most hotly-contested ridings in British Columbia’s provincial election has confirmed the BC NDP won a razor-thin majority government.
Elections officials, supervised by NDP and BC Conservative scrutineers and overseen by a B.C. Supreme Court Judge, resumed hand-counting thousands of ballots cast in Surrey-Guildford — won by the NDP — and Kelowna Centre — won by the BC Conservatives.
The Surrey-Guildford count was particularly important, representing the NDP’s 47th seat in the legislature. If the result were to flip to the Conservatives, David Eby’s New Democrats would have been reduced to a minority government.
The final results of the recount showed the NDP’s Gary Begg defeated BC Conservative Honveer Singh Randhawa by 22 votes.
The judicial recount settles a dramatic final outcome in the riding.
The Conservatives appeared to have won the riding on election night with a 102-vote lead.
But Elections BC’s final vote count, which included absentee and some mail-in ballots, gave the NDP a 27-vote lead in the riding. That advantage was reduced to 21 after an audit found 28 ballots cast outside the district that went initially unreported due to “human error.”
Speaking with Global News Morning BC on Friday, Elections B.C. Chief Electoral Officer Anton Boegman said all of the ballots were actually counted but were not communicated to the agency’s central reporting system.
“In B.C. we have a vote-anywhere model, and we have a count-where-cast model — so in other districts in the province voters from Surrey Guildford for example cast their ballots, those ballots were counted on election night, and the results tape was provided,” he explained.
“Officials should have been able to telephone those results into the district office where it would be entered into our results system. In these cases that didn’t happen.”
Elections workers in Surrey resumed work counting through 19,090 ballots at 9 a.m. Friday.
A concurrent judicial recount in Kelowna Centre also resumed on Friday, where the BC Conservatives held a 38-vote lead.
Judicial recounts in B.C. are triggered when the margin of victory is less than 1/500th of the number of votes cast.
Elections BC is also conducting a partial recount in Prince George-Mackenzie, where a post-election audit discovered an entire ballot box had gone uncounted. The Conservatives hold a large lead in that riding, and the results of the partial recount are not expected to change the outcome.
UBC political scientist Stewart Prest said the drawn-out process makes sense given Elections BC wants to ensure it gets the outcome right, and that the election was historically close.
But he said maintaining confidence in the system is critical, and that once the process is done, the non-partisan elections agency will need to communicate to the public how it can avoid errors in the future.
Both Eby and Conservative Leader John Rustad have called for a review of the process. Eby has called for an all-party committee, while Rustad has called for an independent third-party probe.
Prest said the best solution may be to do both, hiring an outside expert to draft a report, which could then be reviewed by a slate of MLAs from all parties.
“We would essentially have the best of both worlds, information coming from that reputable expert source, but then having the opportunity of partisan actors to scrutinize what is being said and done in approving those choices,” he said.
Eby is expected to unveil his new cabinet on Nov. 18, while a timeline to recall the legislature remains unclear.