On Monday, November 4th, Elections BC announced that a ballot box containing approximately 861 votes went uncounted in the Prince George-Mackenzie electoral district during the recent election.
According to the Chief Electoral Officer, Anton Boegman, a judicial count will have to take place to ascertain the official and final result of the missed ballots.
A judicial recount is conducted by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, but regardless of the outcome, the results will remain the same in this riding.
This is because the successful BC Conservative candidate in the Prince George-Mackenzie electoral district, Kiel Giddens, beat the BC NDP runner-up by over 5,700 votes.
Additionally, Elections BC revealed that there were more errors in the final count of votes; however, they stipulated that none of these errors will impact the result of the election.
“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),” wrote Boegman in a media release.
“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.”
Elections BC says that in the cases of the missed ballot box and additional errors, the unreported votes represent less than 0.08% of all results reported.
According to the Chief Electoral Officer, these judicial recounts and corrections are being done to ensure that all final counts are accurate to how the people of BC voted.
