Elections BC published the results of its final count Wednesday, May 29.
Provincially, the count resulted in the Liberals losing one seat to the NDP in Coquitlam-Maillardville, but the 35-vote spread is so slim it’s now subject to a judicial recount, states Elections BC’s website.
As of May 29, the BC Liberal Party held 49 seats compared to the BC NDP’s 34 seats. Nobel Prize-winning climate scientist Andrew Weaver became the Green Party of BC’s first MLA in Oak Bay-Gordon Head while incumbent MLA Vicki Huntington returned to Delta South as the province’s lone Independent MLA.
In Nanaimo-North Cowichan (NNC), the final tally of ballots cast stands at 24,978, or 62.09 per cent of NNC’s 40,230 registered voters, more than four percentage points above the provincial average; a total of 1,803,051 of the province’s 3,116,626 registered voters — 57.85 per cent — cast ballots in the 2013 provincial election.
NDP MLA Doug Routley secured a final tally of 11,542 votes (46.21 per cent) on his return as NNC’s representative in Victoria.
BC Liberal Party candidate Amanda Jacobson ranked second with 7,685 votes (30.77 per cent) followed by Green Party candidate Mayo McDonough with 3,430 votes (13.73 per cent).
BC Conservative Party candidate John Sherry won 1,603 votes (6.42 per cent), followed by Independent candidates Murray McNab with 647 votes (2.59 per cent) and P. Anna Paddon with 71 votes (0.28 per cent).
The final count shifted the results in NNC by fewer than half a percentage point for any given candidate and the largest gain (0.32 per cent) went to McDonough. Routley, meanwhile, slipped 0.24 percentage points from election night.
According to Don Main of Elections BC, a breakdown of how voters in Ladysmith and Chemainus cast their ballots will be available “mid June” once Elections BC posts preliminary voting area-by-voting area results to its website in Excel format.
That will be followed “later in the year” by the Statement of Votes, Main said, referring to the 700-page report that chronicles the results of the May 14 election in painstaking detail.
The final cost of administering this year’s election will be published in a separate report early next year, Main added.
The judicial recount slated for Coquitlam-Maillardville is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. Tuesday, June 4, Main said, but Elections BC does not know how long it will take.
“The last judicial recount took four days,” Main said.