Despite Vote Glitches, NDP and Conservatives Back Election Outcome

The BC Conservatives raised many culture war topics popular with right-wing voters during the election campaign.

But Stewart Prest, a political science lecturer at the University of British Columbia, praised the Conservatives for not embracing claims that B.C.’s election was somehow compromised, despite several right-wing influencers jumping in as soon as polls closed on Oct. 19 to cast doubt about the process.

“It was really heartening to see senior members of the BC Conservative party stepping up and saying that they accepted the result,” said Prest.

“And that they had seen Elections BC do an outstanding job in overseeing and conducting this election.”

On Oct. 27, Aisha Estey, the party president, said she had watched Elections BC staff count mail-in ballots and “saw nothing that caused me concern.”

Elections BC said Monday that a ballot box containing 861 votes had not initially been counted, noting it would not have changed the outcome in the Prince George-Mackenzie riding won by the Conservatives.

It also found 14 votes had not initially been counted in Surrey-Guildford, where the NDP won a narrow victory.

Conservative Party of BC Leader John Rustad called for an independent review Monday and said the errors were “unprecedented.”

But he also said he was not disputing the final outcome of the election.

On Tuesday, Premier David Eby said the government would propose that an all-party committee examine what happened, hear from experts and recommend improvements for future elections.

Prest welcomed Rustad’s approach.

“We saw, I think, a measured response on the whole from Mr. Rustad, saying that this is essentially a time where people are worried about electoral systems,” Prest said.

“I think those are valid points, but he also said he still accepts the result of the election. He’s saying that we want to make sure that we get these things right, but we can still trust our institutions.”

In the hours and days after B.C.’s election day, right-wing influencers raised questions about the integrity of the provincial vote-counting process. The use of electronic vote tabulators for the first time in a provincial election, the length of time it took to count votes and the availability of mail-in and telephone voting were used to stoke fears about the process.

Podcaster Jordan Peterson challenged the count late on election day. The next day, a YouTube channel called Alberta Report posted a video called “Election Interference B.S.”

The day after the election, Take Back Alberta leader David Parker challenged the results in the close election.

“Dominion voting machines strike again!” he posted in response to a post showing some ridings were still too close to call.

The comment was a reference to a persistent conspiracy theory involving Dominion Voting Systems and the 2020 U.S. presidential election, which has been disproven multiple times.

A week later, as final counts were in progress, Parker claimed B.C.’s election was being stolen. National Post columnist Tristin Hopper chimed in on X to say that he’d “seen buzz... that the B.C. election was hinky,” although he admitted he had no evidence to back up the claim.

But there were earlier indications the same conspiracy theories that fuelled the violent Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol had found followers in Canada.

On Sept. 9, the Vancouver Sun published a short news story about Elections BC using vote tabulator machines to speed counting of the paper ballots, technology that has now been adopted in several Canadian provinces.

The story was a basic interview with an Elections BC communications staffer about how the technology works and what the counting process would look like for the election.

But the comments on the story were filled with suspicions about mail-in ballots and electronic vote-counting machines being manipulated, echoing the outlandish theories put forward by the Donald Trump team after he lost the 2020 election.

Those theories have been thoroughly debunked by the courts, but Trump supporters continue to believe the election was stolen.

Prest said he encountered many similar comments in the days after B.C.’s election, but he also saw a lot of commenters pushing back against the disinformation.

He said Canadian elections are different from the patchwork of rules, governance and technologies in the United States.

While American jurisdictions have experimented with different kinds of vote casting and counting systems, the Canadian voting process of marking a paper ballot has remained unchanged for decades.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the questions that are being raised about the B.C. election process and what Elections BC and other experts have said about these concerns.

Electronic vote counting

For the first time in the province, Elections BC used electronic vote-counting machines, also called tabulators. B.C. voters fed their paper ballots into the machines, and the expectation was that the machines would help count the ballots much faster than the previous, people-powered method.

The machines were made by Dominion Voting Systems, the Canadian company that found itself at the heart of a conspiracy theory adopted by Trump and his legal team. Fox News media personalities also pushed the meritless conspiracy theory. In 2023, Fox News agreed to settle a defamation suit with Dominion for over $700 million, and admitted the network had promoted lies about the 2020 presidential election.

Elections BC said it leased the Dominion vote-counting machines from Elections Ontario and they “have an excellent track record in Canada. They have been used in two Ontario provincial elections, and in New Brunswick provincial elections.”

It took a long time to count the votes

On election night, results were still too close to call a winner. Voters had to wait a full week for Elections BC to count absentee and mail-in votes.

After all votes were counted, the riding of Surrey-Guildford had flipped from Conservative to NDP by just 27 votes, giving the NDP a majority.

Prest said the pace of the vote-counting process is mandated by B.C. legislation and those laws could be changed if necessary to speed up the process.

Are mail-in and telephone votes too risky?

Trump has often targeted mail-in voting as being susceptible to fraud. Following the 2020 election, he misinterpreted normal vote-counting processes as “ballot dumps.” But mail-in voting is an important option for voters with barriers to accessing in-person voting.

During a press conference Tuesday, B.C.’s chief electoral officer, Anton Boegman, answered questions about people who voted by telephone. Around 4,000 people voted this way and the process was rigorous, he said. Voters had to be already registered with Elections BC and went through a verification and anonymization process with one election official before being passed to another team, who created a paper ballot for the voter that was then counted normally.

“It's critical to the accessibility of the ballot in British Columbia, particularly for individuals who have a disability that prevents them from voting independently,” Boegman said.

Telephone voting was first offered in B.C. in 2017. In 2024, Elections BC also allowed voters to cast a ballot at any polling place — another way to encourage people to vote.

What about those missing 861 votes?

Elections BC announced Monday that after finding discrepancies in some data, it conducted a provincewide review and found one uncounted ballot box, as well as a small number of out-of-district ballots that had also missed being counted because election staff in five ridings didn’t follow an Elections BC double-checking procedure.

None of the previously uncounted ballots are expected to change any of the results.

Boegman said Monday that the box of 861 ballots that had been cast in advance was not mislaid but did go uncounted due to human error.

“The ballot box was in the custody of the district electoral officer,” he explained. “It was sealed, and it was in secure custody at all times.”

Boegman said Elections BC would conduct its own review of how the problems happened, but would welcome an independent investigation.