A B.C. election recount in Courtenay-Comox has increased the NDP lead to 13 votes, but absentee ballots still have to be tallied.
The NDP’s Ronna-Rae Leonard remains in front, with 10,056 votes over Liberal Jim Benninger’s 10,043. The election-night results on May 9 had Leonard leading Benninger by nine votes, 10,058 to 10,049.
The final tally in the hotly contested electoral district, which could determine who governs the province, depends on 2,077 absentee ballots. The counting of those ballots is expected to begin Tuesday.
“There’s a certain amount of excitement,” said Glen Sanford, deputy director for the B.C. NDP, who is part of the NDP’s team observing the recount in Courtenay-Comox.
“In this case, Ronna-Rae eked out another four votes in the lead. But the real action is when the uncounted ballots get counted.”
Results in Courtenay-Comox could determine whether the B.C. Liberals will have the 44 seats needed to form a majority government.
The Liberals currently have 43 of the 87 seats in the legislature, and would move to 44 if they retake Courtenay-Comox and no other ridings change hands.
The NDP has 41 seats, while the B.C. Green Party has three and the potential balance of power in a minority government.
Elections B.C. officials began a final count across the province Monday morning. The process involves tallying the 179,380 absentee ballots — those cast outside of a voter’s designated voting station — as well as recounts in two districts.
The second district going through a recount was Vancouver-False Creek, where the ballot account didn’t match the number of votes on the tally sheet on election night. The Liberals now lead the NDP by 569 votes — an increase in nine votes from the initial count.
Requests for recounts are accepted if candidates are separated by 100 or fewer votes, if errors are believed to have been made in the acceptance or rejection of ballots, or if the ballot count doesn’t match the number of votes.
The final count is expected to be complete by the end of the day Wednesday.
Elections B.C. plans to update its website throughout the process.
The process to count absentee ballots can be time-consuming, because officials have to organize absentee votes by type, open and file the certification envelopes, remove the inner envelope that contains the ballot, open that envelope, put the ballot in a ballot box and then count the ballots.
Sanford said officials began opening the certification envelopes in Courtenay-Comox on Monday, but had not begun counting.
The count begins 13 days after election day to allow time for the certification envelopes that contain the ballots to travel from the district where they were cast to the district where the voter is registered.
Absentee ballots include votes collected by teams that visit locations where people are unable to get to voting places, such as hospitals, isolated communities, and logging and fishing camps.
Absentee ballots could swing the result in three other ridings, because election-night results were so close. While all three counts are incomplete, updates Monday night showed that in Maple Ridge-Mission, the NDP lead rose to 166 votes from 120, and in Richmond-Queensborough, the Liberals' lead dropped to 116 from 263. Coquitlam-Burke Mountain is another close race, with the Liberals leading by 268. No update in that race was provided on Monday.
— with files from Lindsay Kines
