Elections BC says ballot box containing 861 votes uncounted

Elections BC 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.

The election agency says omission of the ballot box did not affect the result in the riding of Prince George-Mackenzie, while the unreported votes in Surrey-Guildford were discovered during preparations for a judicial recount in the riding, where Garry Begg’s 27-vote victory gave the NDP a one-seat majority.

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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.

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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.

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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.