Elections BC orders additional riding recount

The B.C. provincial election has still not fully concluded after results were made official last week, and voting concluded more than two weeks ago.

Elections BC says a small proportion of votes in some ridings was accidentally missed and wasn’t included in the final count.

“Election officials in five electoral districts erred by not reporting out-of-district results that had been recorded on 11 tabulator tapes (part of the ballot account). These errors were discovered during preparations for the judicial recounts in Kelowna Centre (KEC) and Surrey-Guildford (SRG) and were the result of human error. None of these results reporting omissions affect the outcome of any electoral district contest.”

That includes 14 votes in the key riding of SRG, where the BC NDP effectively won its majority by a margin of 27 votes

In both cases, Elections BC says the unreported votes represent less than 0.08 per cent of all results reported.

Elections BC says the unreported votes will not affect the outcome of the elections in any riding.

“These reporting omissions impact a small number of votes in 69 electoral districts but comprise only 0.05% of total votes in those districts.”

Two judicial recounts are already underway because of the slim margins in SRG and KEC. Elections BC says it will post an update on the numbers after the recounts.

Meanwhile, a new judicial recount has been ordered for Prince George-Mackenzie, where a ballot box of 861 votes were missed.

Elections BC says those votes will not affect the outcome there either. By current count, BC Conservative Party candidate Kiel Giddens has won by 5,742 votes in Prince George-Mackenzie.