The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - January 09, 2025


BC Conservatives call out potential election fraud⧸issues - Riding lost by only 22 votes!


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23 minutes

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184.4713

Word count

4,294

Sentence count

127

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1

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Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

BC Tory Leader John Rustad and Candidate Hanvir Randha Randhawa hold a press conference on election irregularities in the 2019 BC election. They discuss what they have found so far and what they are doing to investigate further.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. We have a crazy story to discuss coming out of British Columbia
00:00:06.380 today that many of you have already messaged me about or tagged me in on social media. I was
00:00:12.540 already going to talk about it, but it's just demonstrative of the fact that everyone really
00:00:17.280 cares about what's going on here. So BC Conservative leader John Rustad and the BC
00:00:22.780 Conservative candidate for the riding of Surrey Guilford in the last provincial election,
00:00:27.200 on Virindawa, just did a press conference on election irregularities in the BC provincial
00:00:33.560 election that of course took place back in October of 2024. I think that this was big news and it
00:00:40.660 definitely isn't nothing, and so I want to discuss it with you today, but first I will go over to what
00:00:46.860 John had said in this press conference, and then we will discuss what could happen based on all the
00:00:52.260 information they are both going to come out with, as well as the information they are soliciting from
00:00:57.620 the public. So since the election, we have had a group of people that have been looking into a number
00:01:04.200 of things, a number of issues that have come up and that have been raised. And we felt important at this
00:01:10.280 point to share what we have found to date, but also to indicate that there is more work that still
00:01:16.320 needs to be done with regards to this. I've heard many stories about, for example, non-Canadian citizens
00:01:25.280 who have voted in this election. However, that's something that we can't prove because obviously
00:01:31.680 no one's going to be coming forward and putting up their hands saying, you know, please have me eligible
00:01:35.680 for a fine and put me in jail. So these are the types of things that are hard to put on in terms of it,
00:01:42.080 which is one of the reasons why we'll have a recommendation associated with that as well.
00:01:46.480 We found other cases where an individual went to vote and was told they couldn't vote because
00:01:52.480 somebody had already voted. Somebody had already registered a vote in their name. Errors can be
00:01:59.200 made. We can understand those sort of things. Found another incident, for example, where an individual
00:02:05.200 was registered as voting who said they didn't vote. Okay. Once again, you don't know for sure how those
00:02:11.600 things play out. And I just want to cut this off here for just a second because we have to
00:02:16.640 contextualize why individual anecdotes actually do matter here. Hanvir Randhawa standing to John
00:02:24.080 Rustad's left, or I guess standing to his right, lost the riding of Sir Guilford to the incumbent Gary
00:02:30.480 Begg by 22 votes. That is as thin of a margin as you can possibly get in politics. Every once in a while
00:02:38.160 you do to get a case where somebody loses or wins by a single vote, but this is extremely thin.
00:02:44.400 And Hanvir is going to get into it in just a bit that in their riding, they already have more than
00:02:49.520 enough irregularities that should trigger a by-election and they still haven't really even
00:02:54.320 scratched below the surface of asking people about other issues. And small issues do matter when
00:03:00.880 whoever wins that riding decides if it's an NDP majority government or minority government.
00:03:06.640 Yes, if there's 50 irregularities in a race where a thousand votes end up putting someone over the
00:03:11.760 top, we can kind of ignore it. Mistakes can be made. But as John Rustad is going to get into,
00:03:17.760 it's actually a lot of the problems and the lax rules are the problem of changes that David Eby made
00:03:24.880 back in 2019.
00:03:26.000 The kinds of things that we hear. But I think probably some of the more disturbing things that we have
00:03:30.960 found is in particular in the riding of Surrey-Guilford. And Hanvir was our candidate here in Surrey-Guilford
00:03:37.040 and he's here to share a few words as well with regards to the work that he's been doing in terms
00:03:42.400 of follow-up on the election. And in that particular riding, we found a case of a double vote, somebody who
00:03:51.120 voted twice. We have found a case where there have been at least almost two dozen ballots that were cast
00:04:01.440 from people who are not registered or not currently. Sorry, let me rephrase that. Whose place of residence
00:04:11.280 that was on elections BC is not where they currently live. And that could be a massive deal because
00:04:18.400 even if that person wanted to vote in good faith and they showed up to the normal place they usually
00:04:23.440 went to to vote, but they had moved seven blocks away and they actually were in a different riding,
00:04:28.560 that also shapes the election outcome. And so this is all like, this is all very,
00:04:35.120 when I saw, not factual stuff because we should obviously have to go in and verify the facts of this
00:04:40.880 case, but that's very like real stuff. That's not like an abstract theoretical way that maybe a vote
00:04:46.720 wasn't cast that should have been cast. Like, Oh, this voting station had to shut down. And if,
00:04:51.440 and that would have added 50 votes to our total, but like, no, this is like literally somebody voted
00:04:57.840 twice. Somebody voted who wasn't in the riding, stuff like that, that is provable that vote should
00:05:03.120 not count sort of stuff. Follow up that's needed to find out just to make sure to know just where they
00:05:07.840 did that. Did they live in the riding or did they live outside of the riding and use a different
00:05:12.240 address to be able to vote in the riding? One of the more serious issues we have found was associated
00:05:18.800 with a, uh, a care facility, a senior's home where, um, 21, um, mail-in ballots were cast,
00:05:28.080 mail-in ballots where the voting station was just 80 meters across the road from where this facility was,
00:05:34.640 was, uh, uh, located. And individuals in that, uh, facility have come forward with affidavits with
00:05:41.040 regards to, um, uh, voting, regards to what happened associated with that. There's concern that, uh, these
00:05:48.560 votes, um, that a third party has come in, uh, and, uh, being partaken and part of how these votes were cast
00:05:56.240 and done. It is a serious concern that needs to be looked into, uh, with regards to, uh, uh, an
00:06:02.880 investigation. So already this is a fairly shocking blockbuster press conference they have, and it got
00:06:10.320 more detailed when Hanvir Randhawa ended up speaking. And I know Hanvir, so you could say I'm a little
00:06:16.080 biased here, but I know him. That guy worked his butt off in Surrey Guilford. That guy walked around
00:06:22.160 with a Roman legion of volunteers everywhere. He went door knocking, handing out literature,
00:06:26.880 putting up signs. He's not some chump who thinks that I got messed over when he didn't work hard.
00:06:33.120 That guy worked super hard. So I think that guy deserves to have an inquiry. So to be clear,
00:06:37.920 what the conservatives are going to do is that the conservative party is demanding a legislative
00:06:43.440 inquiry into the election procedures to find other issues around voting. And they're calling for
00:06:50.000 basically a suspension of penalties for anyone who may have voted wrongly because you don't want
00:06:57.360 people to be silent just because if they say something, they're going to get targeted when
00:07:01.920 it might've been a non-citizen who voted, who was told they can vote. They ended up casting a ballot
00:07:07.760 and their registration was not like, it was not shown that they were not a citizen. So they were able to
00:07:13.040 cast a ballot and then that person gets fined for saying anything. So you don't want that person to be
00:07:18.000 fine so they can actually speak up. So that's something that John's calling for. They also
00:07:21.680 want voting procedures looked at and then tightened because things were just done wrongly in the
00:07:27.360 election. It's not because there's mass fraud. That's something we should get right. I don't want
00:07:31.920 the comments to fill up with people being like, oh yeah, it should have been an 80 seat majority for
00:07:36.240 the conservatives. That's not what's being said here. If there's any fraud in election, it's always
00:07:41.520 going to be small scale. Somebody potentially in this case going into a care home who either
00:07:46.400 doesn't work there or works there and basically filling up ballots on people's behalf because
00:07:51.520 they have access to all their identification and can just get the person to sign off on it
00:07:56.160 who probably didn't really know what's going on. That's a problem. And it's always going to be small
00:08:01.760 scale like this. So this isn't saying like a riding that the conservatives lost by a thousand votes is
00:08:06.080 going to be overturned or even 300. But when there's multiple ridings where the MVP or conservative
00:08:11.520 candidate only won by less than 100 votes, any irregularities start to kind of really matter
00:08:17.840 here because it shapes how the government is going to act. This isn't even like we're cutting around
00:08:22.240 the edges and maybe two seats should have been flipped, but it was still been an NDP majority
00:08:26.880 by a long shot. The NDP has a literal single seat majority. They have the exact 47 seats they need
00:08:33.520 for a majority. Them going from 47 to 46 makes a really big deal here. So anyways, here is Hanveer
00:08:41.520 speaking to the media. As you know, I'm Hanveer and Dava, so I ran for the election from Surrey Guilford
00:08:47.920 electoral writing as a candidate for Conservative Party of BC. So at the end of the election on October 19,
00:08:56.000 there was a 103 vote lead and with just a handful of votes after that, the lead was gone and I was
00:09:01.680 trailing by 22 votes. So of course that raised reasonable concern. We asked for the voting list,
00:09:07.920 the participation list from BC elections and BC elections provided the list, but in quite a
00:09:15.120 cumbersome manner. I asked for the list, we asked for the list in categorized manner so we could see
00:09:20.720 who has voted through mail-in ballots and who has voted to other alternative methods, but that was not
00:09:27.520 provided to us. That is also a good point to keep in mind. They have found, I believe he's going to go
00:09:33.200 on to say 46 irregularities in a writing that he only lost by 22 votes and which is already double
00:09:39.440 the amount that make up the difference. And of course, some of them could be Conservative votes that
00:09:44.560 would be taken out. Some could be NDP votes. You don't know, maybe they're all green voters and it 0.80
00:09:48.240 really doesn't matter. But the thing is, he's also saying that it's hard to even track this stuff
00:09:54.320 down because if you don't have all the information of who voted when to be able to fact check stuff,
00:09:59.360 you're only having, you're having to rely on leads that come from the public. And I believe that the
00:10:04.640 leads that came from this care home and other facilities came from people who lived there who
00:10:10.000 were reaching out or their family members. And later, John Rustad, when answering media questions,
00:10:14.560 even said some of this information came from people associated with the NDP campaign, bringing it to
00:10:19.040 their attention. With the support that we had at hand and with John Rustad's amazing support as well,
00:10:26.240 we were able to conduct a review of who had voted in Surrey Guilford writing and what contraventions
00:10:33.280 possibly happened. So this particular lodge did stick out because there were 21 million ballots which
00:10:39.200 were casted from this lodge. And this lodge is literally across the street from the voting place.
00:10:45.520 This is the care home he's referring to as a lodge. Which is one of the schools. So that did raise
00:10:51.920 further concerns. And under the section 109.01 of the Election Act, one individual can only assist one,
00:10:59.520 another individual with the mail-in ballot package. So that raised a concern to us, but that also raises a
00:11:07.360 bigger concern that this information was available to BC elections. So why did not it raise a concern to them?
00:11:12.640 But for us to conduct this review that we did, and we found 45 irregularities, contraventions,
00:11:20.080 and the gap between the leading NDP candidate and myself is 22. So 45 irregularities we have found
00:11:28.640 possible irregularities at this point. So the gap is 22. And we are going to be bringing a petition in court
00:11:37.520 shortly as well as to make the election in Surrey Guilford invalid. And that's specifically
00:11:44.080 uh Hanvir and his campaign bringing that uh challenge forward. The Conservative Party of BC is not
00:11:50.800 part of that challenge. That's not because they don't believe in it. I think it's the whole point
00:11:55.360 is that he's already a lawyer. He can already do the legal work himself. So he's going to take take it
00:12:00.720 forward that way. And the Conservative Party is going to go through the legislative inquiry side of things.
00:12:05.920 Because the Conservative Party doesn't really need to be involved in this at all. It wouldn't it would
00:12:09.760 just make the case more cumbersome. Plus this is the proper way of doing it in the sense that
00:12:14.640 you need to have proper standing to bring forward a complaint. The BC Conservatives in theory could
00:12:20.960 technically be denied looking into this because they don't have standing because they're not the
00:12:24.800 actual candidate who was potentially uh like suffered a loss through bad uh election procedures and
00:12:32.400 irregularities. So Hanvir is the correct person to be bringing this one forward. Because the point at
00:12:38.320 hand is that the justice must prevail and the democracy must be protected. The voices of these voters
00:12:46.080 whoever is voting is voting for a reason. They want the right government or they want their vote should
00:12:54.720 be counted in a rightful manner. So this entire endeavor has not been easy but we have finally as
00:13:02.640 as Mr. Rustad has explained as well there are 45 contraventions possible possible contraventions of
00:13:08.160 the election act and especially this lodge as it did stick out. So we need we are asking BC elections and the
00:13:15.680 complaint that you have a copy they redacted that we are asking BC elections to do their thorough investigation
00:13:20.880 into this and also if if it does point to irregularities then other institutions similarly to the same
00:13:28.400 should also be looked into. So that is where we sit with this and Mr. Rustad if you have anything else
00:13:35.920 to add. So just to be clear a complaint has been filed with elections BC um and uh and what we found in
00:13:45.760 that in that facility uh we have heard from people that have come forward and talked about similar
00:13:51.840 issues with other facilities and that to me is what is very concerning because there may be a pattern.
00:13:57.600 It's something that still needs to be investigated we still need to be able to track down um the the
00:14:02.560 work that's in there. We're going to continue doing the work uh that we can do to look at and to continue
00:14:08.960 to follow up on this but it's important now I think that elections BC gets involved uh with this process as
00:14:14.640 well as the independent review to be able to make sure that what is being done here uh is all uh
00:14:20.000 revealed uh and all up and up and that we can make sure with confidence going forward that the
00:14:25.200 election process in British Columbia uh can be relied on and defended. This this is where I actually will
00:14:31.760 give a small critique to the BC conservatives this is why after the BC provincial election on October 19th
00:14:39.920 and all the recounts that had to happen and whatnot never say the election was perfect full integrity
00:14:45.440 all that stuff I never said that but I also have always resisted people saying like the BC NDP only
00:14:51.680 won because of election fraud even then we don't know that we don't know one way or the other even
00:14:57.440 then if Surrey Guilford somehow is flipped through an investigation or a by-election takes place and the
00:15:03.040 conservatives win that one or maybe the NDP still wins it that still wouldn't really mean anything in
00:15:08.480 terms of well that wouldn't actually flip who won the election that would just flip a single riding
00:15:13.040 and the BC NDP would just have a minority government but I've always taken the position that I would just
00:15:17.760 say that I don't have any evidence yet and if evidence comes forward that's good this is evidence
00:15:22.000 coming forward so there we go we can now evaluate these facts but as the conservative party don't come
00:15:27.040 out and say it's actually a great election I observed that it was amazing because you end up the
00:15:31.600 media is now going to say well you guys said and they have said this I watched the full interview
00:15:36.560 or the press conference with the questions you already have a lot of media members from more
00:15:41.200 lefty media sources saying well you said on the days after election day that it was a perfect election
00:15:46.960 and everything was brilliant so what's changed it's like oh okay yeah I guess he said that um this is
00:15:54.000 why you don't say this but it's like that doesn't mean anything they were supporting the system before
00:15:58.560 that and even David Eby the premier of British Columbia the NDP premier had to come out and say yeah
00:16:04.960 ballots were not being handled properly we need this looked into BC election officials shouldn't
00:16:10.080 be taking ballot boxes home which was happening in the early vote ballot boxes would be taken home
00:16:15.120 like taped over and with all the security measures but you still shouldn't take it to somebody's house
00:16:19.840 what happens that the person storing it and the person who has the ability to re-tape it and everything
00:16:25.440 know each other and they're willing to commit fraud that doesn't mean it's happening but this is why you
00:16:29.680 have tight procedures so that we cannot theorize ways of messing it over you lock up all the boxes
00:16:35.280 in the same place where only like two different people need to have the same key or open it up or
00:16:40.240 whatever that's the problem anyways now I think that this is one of those moments where I got to talk about
00:16:49.360 the immediate reaction that many in the media have had to this and then I want to talk a little bit
00:16:53.840 about it good thing is the BC conservatives aren't just pushing up this press conference and then saying
00:16:58.480 nothing afterwards they have put out this statement alongside the uh the uh press conference they
00:17:04.080 held they said leader of the opposition John Rustad is calling for immediate independent review of the
00:17:09.200 provincial election this follows new evidence of irregularities in the pivotal riding of Surrey
00:17:13.680 Guilford which the NDP won by just 22 votes and yeah I think this is absolutely the time where
00:17:19.360 you need an inquiry but look at this post from oops from this guy Maxwell A. Cameron a political science
00:17:26.480 science professor at UBC and he says rust edge allegations are pretty thin lots of vague claims
00:17:33.360 without any evidence followed by recommendations that stoke misinformation and distrust all in the
00:17:38.560 name of confidence in the election I believe he even deleted this his former post and posted this one
00:17:45.840 because it's linked to the same uh or to a CBC article I saw another post from him and maybe I'll go and see
00:17:51.840 if I can find it where he basically said this is election denialism for John Rustad to even care
00:17:58.880 about to care about integrity here look at this here actually I found it he says Rustad's allegations
00:18:05.520 don't pass the smell test oh yeah Maxwell A. Cameron's on the case guys super sleuth Max A. Cameron's
00:18:12.000 already smelled out that this is incredible and he says this looks more like election denialism
00:18:17.520 than defense of democracy this man's an academic you're you're just going to smell out that this
00:18:24.080 looks like election denialism it's not that that goes along with the narrative from the 2020 US
00:18:29.680 presidential election that Trump's people were denying the election and now you're trying to link
00:18:34.400 the two oh no you just you just know oh the the evidence is pretty thin it's almost like they had to
00:18:40.560 send out redacted uh information to the media because you can't just start naming people out of nowhere
00:18:46.640 and so they're going to take this in front of a judge Hanvir is and the conservatives are asking
00:18:51.200 for an inquiry they're not saying we have all the answers here is proof and then dumping out vague
00:18:56.480 allegations they have evidence that are then going to be further investigated with help from the public
00:19:02.640 and I would ask all of you if you know anything about problems in the election go forward go approach
00:19:09.040 Hanvir's team go approach the BC conservatives for an inquiry make sure you actually have something to
00:19:15.680 what you're claiming don't say that well this seems odd make sure you have actual you know evidence to
00:19:22.560 support a claim because again it always annoys me when people are like well I and all my friends
00:19:27.440 voted conservative so I can't see why the MVP would win the riding I was in it's like okay that doesn't
00:19:32.480 mean anything but if you have like people you know who didn't vote who like say that or like somebody
00:19:39.280 who went in to vote when they someone said a ballot's already been cast for you go call out that
00:19:44.240 call out any other way where votes were being collected on mass by a single person because
00:19:49.280 that's illegal all that sort of thing but this again annoys the heck out of me when you have
00:19:54.880 somebody come out and and they say like well this seems like denialism how do you know aren't you
00:20:00.720 supposed to actually care about evidence but you're just here to say oh you're a denier and that's what
00:20:05.440 the media was doing during the questioning period some people were asking good questions other people were
00:20:11.760 doing the whole well isn't this kind of like denialism isn't this going to make people question the
00:20:16.720 voting process guys ask how wanting integrity is not a problem this is a pretty close riding I'd hope
00:20:26.400 that we'd all care about it in fact there was a riding in the last provincial election that had to be
00:20:31.600 overturned through uh like uh through a judicial uh vote count like like through like um a judicial
00:20:39.920 recount because some of the votes were not counted properly or the votes were not like were not real
00:20:45.920 like there was not a real ballot and they had to be destroyed that happens and so I think we should
00:20:52.000 all wait and see what happens here and we should try and make sure that members of the public who know
00:20:57.040 something are able to come forward and say something because again it actually does matter for the
00:21:01.600 governance of British Columbia and I'll just add the cherry on top that it would be nice if the NDP
00:21:07.040 had less power in this government because they are already screwing things up big time their tax revenues
00:21:14.000 in this last fiscal year did not come in the way they thought they were and so they're about to run a
00:21:19.040 massive deficit in 2025 by the way there's only going to be 20 67 sitting days in the legislature this year
00:21:27.040 which allows for the BCNDP to stifle their opposition because there's only so many days a year out of the
00:21:33.920 days that the legislature sits that the opposition gets to forward their own legislative proposals their
00:21:39.920 own bills their own petitions and all this stuff and when there's only 67 days they're maybe going to
00:21:45.520 get like 18 days maybe 20 days to actually do their own business you want as many sitting days as
00:21:52.400 possible by the way 67 days means these people are working like part part-time they're not even
00:21:57.760 working part-time and while yes MLAs work the rest of the year in their own constituency meeting with
00:22:04.080 their constituents and doing other work research and all that the problem is is that now they're stifled
00:22:10.080 and how they present that officially in the legislature where most business can actually be done like
00:22:17.280 fully rather than just sort of doing background work when you present stuff in the legislature there is
00:22:22.240 a little bit more oomph to it than just having to film videos in your office being able to present
00:22:26.800 stuff on the record is kind of the point of being an MLA often anyways so that's it for me today guys
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00:23:14.640 you