B.C.’s election to be certified over the weekend
British Columbians still have a few days to wait to see which party will form the next government.
Preliminary counts from the 2024 Provincial General Election had the B.C. NDP leading or winning in 46 ridings, with the Conservative Party of B.C. holding 45 seats and the B.C. Greens with two seats.
Locally, NDP candidate Harwinder Sandhu lead the Vernon-Monashee riding with roughly 400 votes more than Conservative Dennis Giesbrecht. Conservate candidate Tara Armstrong had a nearly 5,000 vote lead in the Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream riding.
As of Friday morning the results in the local ridings were as follows:
- Vernon-Lumby
- Harwinder Sandhu (NDP) – 11,528 votes (42.5 per cent)
- Dennis Giesbrecht (Conservative) – 11,143 (41.08 per cent)
- Kevin Acton (Unaffiliated) – 4,196 (15.47 per cent)
- Robert Johnson (Libertarian) – 259 (0.95 per cent)
- Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream
- Tara Armstrong (Conservative) – 13,994 votes (54.14 per cent)
- Anna Warwick Sears (NDP) – 9,041 (34.98 per cent)
- Kevin Kraft (independent) – 1,693 (6.55 per cent)
- Andrew Rose (Greens) – 1,119 (4.33 per cent)
ElectionsBC will be certifying the election results between Oct. 26 and 28.
The non-partisan organization said there were 49,000 mail-in ballots that had to be screened and counted. That process will begin Saturday, Oct. 26, and continue through to Sunday afternoon.
ElectionsBC will also be doing recounts of two ridings, Juan de Fuca-Malahat and Surrey City Centre, where the NDP candidates hold a lead of less than 100 votes over their Conservative counterparts, which triggered automatic recounts.
Those recounts will begin Sunday, Oct. 27.
On Monday, Oct. 28, ElectionsBC will complete the final count of absentee ballots in all electoral districts, provide updates on the recounts, and then provide hourly updates on the finalized results of the election.
Vernon Matters will publish updates on the finalized vote counts as they become available.