The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - October 26, 2024


BC Election deadlock - 66,000 ballots left to be counted!


Episode Stats

Length

13 minutes

Words per Minute

180.00752

Word Count

2,392

Sentence Count

123

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary

It's election day in British Columbia and there's a lot of mail-in ballots left to count. In this episode, I discuss which ridings are likely to have the most votes to count, and which ones are leaning towards the Conservatives. I also discuss the possibility of telephone voting, and whether or not it should be allowed.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 So last time we talked about the British Columbia provincial election, it was a day after election day and we still didn't know who was actually going to win the election because there were several ridings that were practically tied and we had a lot more mail-in ballots left to count.
00:00:18.660 Originally, our mail-in ballot number was 49,000. This includes both mail-in ballots as well as provisional ballots. Some people go directly to returning officers' offices and just writing up their ballot right there. That's totally fine, obviously, but that's a minority of the 49,000.
00:00:37.760 But since we reported that, now the amount of ballots that has to be counted has gone from 49,000 to 65,000. I believe it's actually 66,000 at the official count that was released yesterday.
00:00:51.280 It's nothing to be concerned about that the ballot number went up. Really, it's just that there are a lot of very rural areas in BC where ballots were being turned in, which were, in fact, picked up and postmarked on October 19th.
00:01:05.140 But obviously, if you pick up ballots in Haida Gwaii or somewhere else, it will take you a little while to be able to actually send them to a BC elections depot so that they can be counted.
00:01:18.240 The good thing is that the ballots are actually leaning towards the Conservatives.
00:01:22.340 But before I get to that number in terms of where the ballots are probably going to be leaning in terms of the vote count,
00:01:28.980 I just want to show you the ridings where there is high amounts of mail-in ballots and where they could actually make the difference.
00:01:35.720 Because there is totally a chance that the Conservatives either gain a minority government or a majority government.
00:01:41.760 In fact, I actually think it's probably a greater than 50% chance that the Conservatives flip at least one seat here,
00:01:48.280 considering one of them is currently tied and probably leaning a bit conservative.
00:01:52.240 But before I do that, I will say, hey, if you're not subscribed to this channel, please subscribe to the channel.
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00:02:24.700 Anyways, so the riding that really matters right here is Juan de Fuca, Malahat.
00:02:30.980 This is the closest riding in this provincial election.
00:02:34.760 It is within 20 votes.
00:02:36.640 I think it's 20 or 23, depending on which count you look at.
00:02:39.920 And there were 496 ballots here to count from the category of certification envelopes containing mail-in and assisted telephone votes.
00:02:51.760 The telephone votes are the things that are concerning to me, at least in the long run, in terms of politics.
00:02:57.440 I don't know how you administer a telephone vote, and I do hope that they counted how many were specifically telephone votes in a more detailed breakdown.
00:03:05.900 Because I think there is a very good legal case to say that telephone voting should not be real.
00:03:11.520 There's no way of verifying the person is actually the person who they say they are.
00:03:15.960 They could just take somebody else's ID in the household and vote for them.
00:03:19.780 There's no way of knowing.
00:03:21.380 I would like to see if there's recordings, voice recordings of the people voting.
00:03:25.140 Because it would be a bit odd if you, like, call up someone who is a woman and it's a man's voice saying,
00:03:29.960 yes, I'd like to vote for the BCNDP or whatever.
00:03:33.880 Could also go the other way, obviously.
00:03:36.240 But the problem is when elections are coming down to who has a bigger ground game team and the NDP had an $8 million advantage,
00:03:45.080 you're going to have a lot more activists willing to go out and find votes for the NDP than the conservatives.
00:03:51.400 But then there is another 185 votes that are certification envelopes containing special and absentee ballots.
00:03:57.600 That would be people going and voting maybe through the military or going and voting at offices directly.
00:04:06.200 Because, again, in a lot of rural areas, you have an electoral district office in your area, but not an advanced voting location.
00:04:11.780 But it effectively acts the same way.
00:04:14.460 So there are 681 votes left to count in Juan de Fuca, Malahat.
00:04:19.920 There's a few other places that are going to matter a lot.
00:04:22.200 Courtney Comox is.
00:04:24.160 That's actually an area where the conservatives are leading by about 186 votes or so.
00:04:28.420 But there are 996 votes left to count.
00:04:31.960 So that white might be a nail-biter, too, and a potential flip for the NDP.
00:04:37.120 But another place that matters a lot is, if I can find it, it's always sometimes hard to find right away.
00:04:45.380 It's on the next page.
00:04:46.960 Coquitlam Burke Mountain.
00:04:48.740 The NDP lead this riding by around 208 votes or something like that, 227 votes.
00:04:56.360 There are 711 votes left to count.
00:04:59.120 And even though that is a bigger gap to overcome than in other ridings,
00:05:03.720 the good thing is that it has such a massive rural area after the Coquitlam area in the Burke Mountain side of that riding
00:05:11.440 that I'm actually pretty hopeful that a lot of those votes will be coming for the conservative
00:05:16.580 simply because they are coming from remote areas where obviously people who work in farming and, you know,
00:05:23.580 farming and trades tend to vote conservative heavily.
00:05:26.760 But the other one that's actually extremely close,
00:05:29.920 the second closest riding in the entire election is Surrey City Center.
00:05:34.500 And there are a total of 476 votes left to count, definitely on the lower end of the mail-in votes.
00:05:42.920 But the NDP in that riding only leads by 96 votes.
00:05:48.080 And so, yes, the conservative would have to win the next mail-in tranches by a large margin
00:05:53.820 in order to come up, be over to overcome that gap.
00:05:57.240 But considering the fact that we had Surrey as a kind of a late-breaking type of a big surge area for the conservatives,
00:06:05.420 it could happen.
00:06:06.540 But again, mostly just comes down to Juan de Fuca Malahat.
00:06:10.080 And the reason I'm generally pretty confident that we will be able to at least grab one of these ridings,
00:06:15.460 and we're probably not going to have any of the conservative ridings flip,
00:06:18.640 is that this was the last poll that Main Street conducted,
00:06:23.340 Main Street Research conducted, of 2,064 people.
00:06:27.260 And they were asking people their likelihood to vote.
00:06:29.780 And certain to vote category, this was people who had not yet voted,
00:06:33.940 and they were saying whether or not they want to show up.
00:06:35.980 So the conservatives led that by a little bit.
00:06:37.660 The NDP are a bit behind.
00:06:39.520 But this was, because it was the last poll,
00:06:41.380 obviously a lot of people had already voted in advance.
00:06:45.280 And so the NDP always had a slight lead over early voting, advanced polls.
00:06:52.060 It depended on the day.
00:06:53.000 Sometimes the conservatives could lead the NDP.
00:06:55.340 It depended, usually the NDP led by a couple of points.
00:06:59.000 But on voted by mail, oddly enough,
00:07:02.100 despite many people having a bias towards the idea
00:07:04.540 that the people voting by mail would be more likely to be NDP,
00:07:08.740 the conservatives actually led in this poll 47.3 to 39%.
00:07:13.600 I've seen it a little bit lower than that.
00:07:15.860 I've seen it much higher than that.
00:07:17.920 And if that holds, with Plantefuca Malahat,
00:07:22.240 the conservatives would quite easily win that riding.
00:07:25.100 On top of that, Plantefuca Malahat, if you know the riding,
00:07:28.820 is on the southern tip of Vancouver Island.
00:07:31.620 There's a lot of rural area, and there is a naval base near that area.
00:07:35.600 And despite the naval base not being directly in the riding,
00:07:39.360 most sailors who own homes on Vancouver Island live in towns like Souk outside of Victoria
00:07:46.260 rather than paying for extremely expensive Victoria real estate.
00:07:50.340 And from the people in the Navy I've talked to since this theory about the Navy playing a big role
00:07:56.440 in this riding potentially, a lot of them have said,
00:07:59.080 oh yeah, every single person I know in the Navy voted for the conservatives.
00:08:02.280 So if we can get this one extra riding, it at least becomes a 46-45 scenario with the conservatives and the NDP.
00:08:11.500 Yes, there are two green MLAs, and they could technically just throw this thing over to the NDP still.
00:08:18.280 But I think that at least the conservatives leading a minority government would probably ensure,
00:08:23.560 or even if the NDP had to form a coalition,
00:08:26.220 it'd probably ensure that we're going to have another election in at least one year's time or so,
00:08:31.100 because nobody is going to want to govern in this very tight manner.
00:08:34.660 And at that point, it will be a much, much easier election for the BC conservatives to win,
00:08:40.620 because they get the actual taxpayer funding that the Greens and the NDP had.
00:08:44.880 Remember that in the last election, there was a rule that you got $2 or about,
00:08:50.720 I think it's like $187 per vote you got in the last election given to you every single year.
00:08:56.600 The conservatives only got 2% of the vote, so obviously they didn't get that much money.
00:09:02.220 And on top of that, there was a rule that if you could score more than 10% of the vote in any given riding,
00:09:08.380 you were given back 50% of your campaign spending funds.
00:09:13.160 So going into this election, the conservatives only had about $200,000 from taxpayers,
00:09:18.600 and I think we should just get rid of these rules, just have legitimate ways of actually fundraising publicly,
00:09:25.700 because the problem right now is that you can only donate $1,400, which I know that's a lot for an average person,
00:09:31.800 but it means that there's really no such thing as a very big donor.
00:09:35.100 Other provinces, you can donate $3,000, $4,000.
00:09:38.360 I know federally, it's still only $1,700, but at least federally, you have a far wider net to cast,
00:09:44.420 whereas in BC, there's not that many people who are going to max at a donation.
00:09:48.160 And then if you can't get like 1,000 people to max you at a donation,
00:09:52.360 it's going to be very difficult to actually be able to fundraise for a provincial-wide election campaign.
00:09:58.860 So the conservatives ended up having $200,000 taxpayer dollars, and the BC NDP had $8 million.
00:10:05.580 So they had a $7.8 million advantage.
00:10:08.340 The BC Greens had far more money than the BC Conservatives had,
00:10:12.560 because they had like 18% of the vote last election, or maybe like 15% or so,
00:10:16.720 and then they won a few ridings, and they were above 10% in several of them.
00:10:21.380 So even the Greens were better funded than the conservatives,
00:10:24.580 and the BC NDP have still basically lost this election.
00:10:28.680 Even if they pulled a majority, it's not really a win,
00:10:31.040 but if the Conservatives grab up one more riding, they effectively won the election,
00:10:34.520 and they did it with $5 and a ham sandwich.
00:10:36.940 Which, ugh, it's so annoying to then see people in the aftermath saying,
00:10:40.980 oh, well, if this or that didn't happen, it would have been a BC NDP wipeout.
00:10:44.940 You guys were already given every advantage you could get.
00:10:47.860 And then I was hearing people like whining about,
00:10:50.860 well, if the NDP or if there wasn't this stupid rule,
00:10:54.460 or if theirs wasn't this like instance or whatever,
00:10:58.320 you know, if the mainstream media commented more on the crazy candidates
00:11:04.080 the Conservatives were running, then the BC NDP would have won.
00:11:06.940 Okay, sure, guys, sure.
00:11:09.600 Everyone thinks that they're, like, even though I, throughout the entire election,
00:11:13.100 I never saw any of those stories smearing conservative candidates
00:11:16.040 actually move the needle.
00:11:18.020 People really didn't care.
00:11:19.600 Because most people mostly care about their taxes, crime,
00:11:23.160 their kids, and a few other issues.
00:11:25.660 And it never really runs into,
00:11:28.300 oh, I care that someone made a joke five years ago on Twitter.
00:11:32.120 Anyways, so that should be it for me today, guys.
00:11:34.900 I'm going to come back with another update later.
00:11:37.400 Based on the way that the 66,000 votes split,
00:11:40.680 I think there is a very good chance that the Conservatives can win.
00:11:44.300 But never say never.
00:11:46.620 And I think that some of these ridings probably will just end up in court
00:11:50.260 because of things like telephone voting if they stay extremely close.
00:11:54.200 Who could really say that they won if it's only separated by, like, 50 votes
00:11:58.360 and, like, 300 people voted by telephone?
00:12:00.880 And we have no way of actually knowing if they wanted to vote that way.
00:12:05.420 Or it's just simply people being called up and asked if they want to vote.
00:12:09.560 I heard that that was a thing, that people were being called and told,
00:12:13.340 you haven't voted yet.
00:12:14.380 Would you like to vote?
00:12:15.560 And you're like, you're not supposed to reach out and call somebody.
00:12:18.560 They can go find out if there's a way of voting by telephone
00:12:21.240 or send out notifications.
00:12:22.840 If you're telling people and texting people, you can vote by telephone.
00:12:26.520 That's not real.
00:12:27.800 That's now soliciting votes, especially depending on how you do it.
00:12:31.800 It might be completely, like, out of whack with, like, thinking about it this way.
00:12:36.980 BC elections is far more likely to have NDP voters' data
00:12:40.940 than BC conservative people's data
00:12:43.020 because BC conservative voters are uniquely, disproportionately new voters
00:12:48.380 because they haven't voted in past elections
00:12:50.260 because the options were BC liberals or BC NDP.
00:12:54.860 Mini rant right there about telephone voting.
00:12:57.760 It really should just be maybe one or two days of voting.
00:13:00.160 There should be one advance poll day
00:13:01.760 and there should be one day on election day to vote.
00:13:04.860 And that's it.
00:13:05.400 And I think those two days should be pretty close together
00:13:07.540 because I don't like this idea that someone's voting 15 days
00:13:10.520 before the actual election has fully wrapped up.
00:13:14.280 Anyways, okay, that's it for me.
00:13:16.640 See you guys later.