Vancouver voters choose two new city councillors in weekend byelection

Voters in Vancouver have chosen two new city councillors, in a byelection that saw a significant turnout on Saturday.

Sean Orr with the Coalition of Progressive Electors party and Lucy Maloney with One City have been deemed unofficially elected. The city’s Chief Elections Officer will make an official declaration on Wednesday.

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Nearly 68,000 eligible voters cast their ballots at the 25 polling stations. More than 5,400 ballots were submitted by mail, making up about eight per cent of the ballots cast.

Those numbers represent a 40 per cent increase over the 2017 byelection.

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Voters were met with long lineups at the polling stations on Saturday – a problem the mayor blamed on the city’s decision to cut the number of polling stations by half, compared to the 2017 byelection.

Orr is a housing advocate who said during his election campaign he’d fight to protect renters, while Maloney is an environmental lawyer and highlighted improved road and pedestrian safety in the city.

Maloney said the results are a reflection of voters’ dissatisfaction with the current council’s failure to deal with issues such as homelessness, housing and affordability.

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The byelection was needed to fill seats vacated by the Green Party’s Adriane Carr, who recently resigned from council and OneCity’s Christine Boyle, who’s now an elected member of the provincial legislature.

The new councillors are scheduled to attend their first council meeting on Tuesday.

TEAM for a Livable Vancouver, which ran two candidates for council in the byelection, said in a statement that it plans to file a complaint over the lack of adequate staffing and resources for this byelection.

Party spokesperson Sal Robinson said “it’s outrageous to ask voters to wait an hour or more to exercise their democratic right to vote — and that some people take one look at the length of the lines and simply walk away.”

“This poor planning for voting stations is demonstrably discouraging people from exercising their democratic right to vote,” Robinson added.

With files from The Canadian Press.