B.C. advance voter turnout on pace to hit highest mark in 20 years

B.C.’s advance voter turnout came just shy of reaching its highest mark going back two decades on Wednesday — and there are still three early voting days left to go.

Elections BC released the results of advance voting to date in the 2017 provincial election on Thursday.

It showed that 327,491 voters had gone out to cast their ballots in the first three days of advance voting.

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That was just shy of the 366,558 advance voters who came out for the 2013 election — which was, at that time, the highest since 1996, the earliest year for which Elections BC provided advance voting data.

It was also more than the 290,220 who voted before election day in 2009.

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B.C. need only see about 40,000 additional advance voters over three days from May 4 through 6 to beat the numbers seen in the last election.

That’s fewer than half of the 96,457 advance voters who came out on May 3 alone.

The trend means that advance voting is on pace to hit the highest mark the province has seen in all the years that Elections BC provided numbers for.

READ MORE: Days before the B.C. election, BC Liberals and NDP are locked in a tight race

But strong advance turnout doesn’t always translate to high voter turnout in the election.

While advance turnout was high in 2013, 57.1 per cent of registered voters cast ballots that year, representing the second-lowest share of voters going back to 1928.

Advance votes accounted for 20.34 per cent of total votes in the 2013 election.

At 55.14 per cent, the 2009 election marked the lowest share of votes by registered electors since 1928. Advance voters made up a 17.57 per cent share of electors that year.

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At 6,413 voters, the riding of Courtenay-Comox has seen the strongest advance turnout so far in this election, followed by battleground riding Saanich North and the Islands (6,368) and Esquimalt-Metchosin (6,254).

The Liberals are considered favourites in Courtenay-Comox, but the race in Saanich North and the Islands is considered a very close race.

In 2013, the three candidates running for the BC Liberals, BC NDP and BC Greens came within 379 votes of each other.

The NDP’s Gary Holman took the riding with a lead of 163 votes over BC Liberal Stephen Roberts, while Greens candidate Adam Olsen trailed Roberts by 216 votes.

All three candidates are running for those parties again in this election.