Elections BC will face questions Tuesday morning about a missed ballot box and hundreds of uncounted votes discovered after the provincial election.
A news conference is scheduled for 10 a.m. where B.C.’s chief electoral officer is expected to provide an update on corrections and the application for a judicial recount in Prince George-Mackenzie.
That is the electoral district where an uncounted ballot box and its 861 votes were found during a provincewide review.
The review was ordered by Elections BC after some mistakes were found during preparations for the upcoming judicial recounts in Kelowna Centre and Surrey-Guildford. That review found that a few out-of-district votes were not properly recorded due to human error.
Elections BC says it wanted to ensure it caught any similar mistakes but adds that none of the errors found are enough to change final results — even the missed ballot box will not affect the outcome because the Conservatives won Prince George-Mackenzie by a large margin.
“Our elections rely on the work of over 17,000 election officials from communities across the province. Unfortunately, unintentional human errors do occur in administering the vote,” said Anton Boegman, B.C.’s chief electoral officer, in a statement released on Monday.
“The use of Chief Electoral Officer Orders and the judicial recount process enables such errors to be corrected. These steps are critical to ensure all votes are accurately counted and reported prior to the end of the election period.”
The errors prompted Conservative Leader John Rustad to call for an “independent review” on Monday.
“While I am not disputing the final outcome pending remaining judicial recounts, it’s clear that mistakes like these severely undermine public trust in our electoral process,” he said.
Pending the judicial recounts, the NDP holds 47 seats in the BC Legislature, the minimum needed to form a majority government. The BC Conservatives have 44 seats.