Finishing third in the Oak Bay-Gordon Head riding behind the NDP and Conservatives was disappointing but not unexpected for Green candidate Lisa Gunderson.
What was awkward was supporters congratulating her for days afterward on her second-place finish.
“It’s more of a situation of how many times am I going to have to explain this to people,” said Gunderson, a psychologist and deputy leader of the B.C. Greens.
Supporters and friends texted, phoned her and stopped her on the street to congratulate her on beating the Conservative candidate. She didn’t.
Final vote counting on Monday showed NDP candidate Diana Gibson had a decisive win in the riding, with 14,519 votes. B.C. Conservative candidate Stephen Andrew was second with 8,542 votes, and Gunderson third with 6,508.
However, on election night, with 27 of 29 polls reporting, Elections B.C.’s website erroneously showed Gunderson with 8,035 votes — well behind Gibson, who had 13,154 at the time, but ahead of Andrew at 7,766.
It was broadcast live on television and Gunderson was interviewed about her performance based on that result.
For supporters who didn’t see the final tally, or weren’t constantly checking the Elections B.C. website, Gunderson seemed to be in second place for a time.
While results on election night come in poll by poll and candidates can pull ahead or stall at different times throughout the night, candidates’ vote counts typically don’t go backwards.
Gunderson’s campaign team asked for a recount but the request was denied by Elections B.C., which said there was no evidence that votes were not correctly accepted or ballots were not correctly rejected, that votes were not accurately recorded, or that vote-counting equipment did not process ballots accurately.
Elections B.C. spokesman Andrew Watson told the Times Colonist in an email on the discrepancy in preliminary results in Oak Bay-Gordon Head “was due to a data entry error by the office staff person entering results being reported over the phone.”
When tabulator-result tapes were returned to the district electoral office later on election night, “they were checked against the preliminary results reported in our system, which identified the error and a correction was made,” said Watson.
Watson said it’s a standard part of Elections B.C.’s “quality assurance process” to resolve these types of errors.
“A data entry error of this nature is not grounds for a recount under the Election Act,” he said.
Gunderson said she’s under no illusion that a recount would change the results but supported the campaign’s request for a recount to have a better explanation of what happened and prevent it from happening again.
She said she accepts that it was a data entry error, saying Elections B.C. was apologetic, explained it was human error and documented it.
B.C. political leaders, including Premier David Eby, Conservative Leader John Rustad and Green Leader Sonia Furstenau, as well as campaign managers and scrutineers, have publicly applauded the independent office of Elections B.C. for the way it conducted the voting, counting and recounting processes.
Automatic judicial recounts will be held for the ridings of Kelowna Centre and Surrey-Guildford because the count difference between the top two candidates is less than 1/500th of the total ballots considered.
>>> To comment on this article, write a letter to the editor: [email protected]
