B.C.’s chief electoral officer defends election integrity as premier proposes all-party review into counting
British Columbia’s chief electoral officer says “extremely challenging weather conditions” and a new voting system factored into human errors that saw hundreds of ballots go uncounted in the provincial election — though none were large enough to change results.
Anton Boegman says Elections B.C. is investigating the mistakes to “identify key lessons learned” in order to improve training, change processes or make recommendations for legislative change to ensure “errors can be prevented in the future.”
Boegman says the issues will be “fully documented” in his report to the legislature on the provincial election, the first held using electronic tabulators.
Anton Boegman, B.C.’s chief electoral officer, has provided more details about a ballot box containing 861 votes that wasn’t counted in the recent provincial election. He said the uncounted ballots for the Prince George-Mackenzie riding won’t affect the outcome.
The errors prompted B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad to call for an independent review.
On Tuesday, Premier David Eby said his party “will propose an all-party committee to examine the systems used, steps taken by Elections B.C., hear from experts, and recommend improvements for future elections.”
Eby said he remains confident in the outcome of the election.
“At the same time, it’s clear we need to review the processes, technologies and systems used to tally votes accurately and support public confidence,” he said in a statement.
B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad is calling for an independent review of mistakes made during the B.C. election vote tally after some votes were left uncounted.
In an interview with Gloria Macarenko, the host of CBC’s On The Coast, Rustad said that an all-party committee might mean partisan politics comes into play given the NDP has secured a majority and would dictate committee appointments.
He reiterated his call for an independent review and asserted that he was not disputing the outcome of the election.
“Democracy is a delicate structure, if you want to call it that,” he said. “And if we do not have confidence in our democratic processes, we are in serious trouble. And I don’t want to be doing anything that’s going to undermine the process.”
Elections B.C. announced Monday that it had discovered 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 B.C. NDP.
The omission of the ballot box did not affect the result in the Prince George-Mackenzie electoral district where the box was found, according to Elections B.C.
Box not retabulated
At a news conference on Tuesday, Boegman said the uncounted ballot box had not gone missing, despite some speculation, and was sealed and in the secure custody of the district electoral officer. He said the box was at an advance voting station.
“After the first day of advance 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, noting this was the process taken throughout B.C. following each day of advance voting.
On the second day, officials at the station determined that a ballot that had gone into the tabulator ballot box had not been tabulated, Boegman said.
He said Elections B.C. then issued an order requiring that all ballots from the tabulator must be retabulated on Oct. 17, to ensure that correct results would be able to be reported on election night.
But he said only the ballots from the second day of advance voting were retabulated.
“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.
Elections B.C. said the unreported 14 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 NDP to a one-seat majority government.
Justin Leifso, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Victoria, said that a “heightened political atmosphere” due to election denial in the U.S. had made Elections B.C.’s disclosure come at an unfortunate time.
“I think that in the last four years there has been a great deal more attention paid in North American politics to democratic institutions. And so, even before the election, there were people who were calling into question the legitimacy of the B.C. election,” he told Stephen Quinn, host of CBC’s The Early Edition.
here are calls for a review after Elections B.C. announced it found several errors in vote counting following the October election. Justin Leifso, an assistant political science professor at the University of Victoria, says the system seems to be working, but believes the mistakes are coming under more scrutiny due to the U.S. presidential election.
Judicial recounts
Boegman said he’s confident election officials have found all “anomalies” from the election count.
He said the vote was administered by approximately 17,000 workers, less than half than would have been needed under the old paper-based system, many of whom worked long hours on a day when an atmospheric river washed over southwestern B.C.
He said results for the election will be returned in 90 of the province’s 93 ridings on Tuesday, while judicial recounts will be held in Surrey-Guildford and Kelowna Centre on Nov. 7-8, and in Prince George-Mackenzie before Nov. 12.
Boegman said out-of-district voting has been a part of B.C.’s elections for many decades, and explained how thousands of voters used the province’s vote-by-phone system, calling it a “very secure model” for people with disabilities.
“I think this is a unique and very important part of our elections, providing accessibility to British Columbians,” he said. “They have unparalleled access to the ballot box that is not found in other jurisdictions in Canada.”
