Elections BC – Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows

Posted January 10, 2009 by Sacha Peter - Link
Category: Analysis Comments Off

Upon further examination of the Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows results, I have encountered a minor mistake in the 2005 Elections BC final report. Technically the report is correct, but the process leading to the report was probably not followed properly, leading to a slight discrepancy of the reported popular vote in Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows.

The excerpt for Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows can be found here. On page 3, you can see the results of poll 71:

Denise Briere-Smart, BC Marijuana – 78 votes
Rick Butler, DRBC – 96 votes
Mike Gildersleeve, Green – 15 votes
Michael Sather, NDP – 4 votes
Ken Stewart, BCL – 4 votes

This area of Maple Ridge apparently had a huge outpouring of support for the two minor party candidates, not seen anywhere else in the riding, nor the rest of the province.

I think what was likely was that the votes for Sather and Stewart were transposed with Briere-Smart and Butler. The differential between them would have made no difference in the outcome of the election.

If you are wondering where Poll 71 is, it is bounded in light blue here (note the electoral boundaries displayed in this map are for the 2009 distribution, although in 2005 the boundary was still in Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows):

Nothing terribly different about this area in Maple Ridge than the rest of the areas around it.

What happens after an election is that the process of final count (sections 127 to 138 of the BC Election Act) takes place, where the returning officer goes through the paper results returned from polling stations and tabulates them into a final return to the chief electoral officer. Other activities at this time include counting votes that were not counted on election day (e.g. special ballots). There can also be re-counts performed if the vote differential is less than 100 votes or other reasons (Section 136). The vote difference was far enough away that it didn’t make any difference and the tabulation was probably not closely examined by the NDP or the BC Liberal party.

However, I would caution candidates in the future in relatively close elections to pay attention to the final count process.

Federally, there are slight procedural differences (for example, special ballots are counted at the returning officer’s office after the polls close on election day), and their final count process is referred to as validation. Candidates would be well-advised to pay attention to this process as there was a close race in BC (not thought to be close before the election!) that was made even closer after validation.

In the 2008 Federal election in Vancouver South, Liberal Ujjal Dosanjh, after election-day counting was up 16,774 to 15,995 votes against Conservative Wai Young, a comfortable margin. After validation, this was reduced to 16,101 vs. 16,068. A judicial recount subsequently gave a 16,109 to 16,087 result.