The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - November 05, 2024


BC's election plagued by lost ballots and glitches - Recounts ongoing


Episode Stats

Length

20 minutes

Words per Minute

186.41934

Word Count

3,752

Sentence Count

209


Summary

Elections BC has found a box of missing ballots in Prince George, but it won't change the results, which is 865 ballots. They also have a judicial recount set for November 7th-8th, where the NDP is only leading by 21 votes, but they also found a computer glitch that meant that certain ballots were not counted.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 It is currently November 5th of the year 2024.
00:00:06.220 The American presidential election is going on as we speak.
00:00:11.220 The British Columbia provincial election happened on October 19th, 2024.
00:00:19.060 And I am still talking about the BC provincial election,
00:00:22.820 because for some reason, Elections BC is the worst organization on the planet when it comes to counting ballots.
00:00:30.840 We have found a box of ballots in Prince George somewhere in a writing to the conservatives,
00:00:37.060 admittedly one-handedly, and it won't change the results, which is 865 ballots or so just left uncounted.
00:00:43.600 Somebody just forgot to count this entire box, and yet they had finalized the results before finding it,
00:00:49.640 not realizing that there was an entire ballot box that they hadn't counted.
00:00:53.780 But we also have problems in one of the writings where there is a judicial recount set to happen on November 7th to 8th,
00:01:01.940 or I think it might be 6th to 7th, where the NDP are only leading by 21 votes.
00:01:07.660 It used to be 27 votes, but they also found a computer glitch that meant that certain ballots weren't counted,
00:01:13.900 and now it's fallen from 27 votes to just a 21-vote lead.
00:01:18.680 And I remember I was called an election denier a few days after the election
00:01:24.120 when I had problems with the processes that BC elections had had for mail-in voting and for telephone voting,
00:01:32.040 and I thought it was very messy, the fact that we thought a few days after the election,
00:01:36.500 49,000 ballots had been postmarked on the 19th and still had to be counted,
00:01:40.720 and over the next few days, we had then found out another 16,000 ballots had also come in,
00:01:46.240 apparently postmarked for the 19th.
00:01:48.680 I'm not saying anything's happening or it's rigged, but obviously processes need to be fixed.
00:01:53.740 And me merely saying that had a bunch of leftists and people in the legacy media trying to dunk on me for it
00:02:01.020 when I had a perfectly reasonable position, and now BC Premier, NDP leader, David Eby agrees with me,
00:02:08.560 because he is going to have an all-parties committee or panel on reviewing BC election procedures.
00:02:16.620 This is absolutely wild, but first we will go into the ballots still left to count and the judicial recounts,
00:02:23.820 what we can expect to happen, and then I'm just going to keep ranting on how stupid this whole thing is.
00:02:29.360 It's absolutely ridiculous.
00:02:32.260 Anyways, but before I get into the exact ballot issues, I also want to remind you all,
00:02:37.340 about 75% of you watching this video right now are not actually subscribers to the channel,
00:02:42.300 so make sure you hit the subscribe button and like this video so that you'll keep seeing my videos in the future
00:02:47.900 and not just popping up at random.
00:02:50.460 But anyways, without further ado, let's get into this recent news out of the writing of Surrey Guilford,
00:02:56.920 Robert Shaw, covering this from, where is he? Check News.
00:03:00.380 Thank you for doing this all, Robert Shaw.
00:03:02.480 So before we read the top post there, here is the bottom post from November 4th, just yesterday,
00:03:08.000 and he says,
00:03:09.040 New, the BCNDP, Gary Beggs' lead in Surrey Guilford has shrunk from 27 votes to 21 votes
00:03:15.820 due to the missing, miscounted ballot issues elections BC revealed today.
00:03:20.580 The NDP majority government hangs in the balance of this writing.
00:03:23.780 Judicial recounts run November 7th to 8th.
00:03:26.400 And apparently what had happened in this case, or maybe I'm confusing it with another case,
00:03:30.800 that as they're sticking ballots in the tabulators, there was just a glitch and certain ballots were not counted.
00:03:36.400 They were basically inserted in, you know, tries to scan and fails, drops in the ballot box anyways,
00:03:42.320 but it wasn't actually fully counted.
00:03:43.860 So the amount of votes it had totaled was not actually the total amounts of paper ballots in the tabulator.
00:03:51.940 And again, it's not that they are deliberately doing this.
00:03:55.000 Who would deliberately try and mess with just like a handful of 14 ballots?
00:04:00.140 Not really anybody.
00:04:01.480 But it's proving, let's stop using tabulators.
00:04:04.600 It's not foolproof.
00:04:06.080 Paper costs less.
00:04:07.240 And there's no actual problems with just hiring more ballot workers.
00:04:11.240 If anything, it creates a bunch of jobs for people to be able to have for a month,
00:04:15.400 to be able to work for BC elections, organizing the polling stations, counting ballots, all this stuff.
00:04:22.100 And we can get results same day.
00:04:24.740 And it's also very easy to check our work because we're already hand counting.
00:04:28.780 And if we think there is a discrepancy, we can change who's counting which piles,
00:04:33.600 recount them, and make sure everything is squared away.
00:04:36.600 But because we need to be always progressing into the future,
00:04:40.440 we must always be using tabulators or whatever the new fangled mechanical way of voting is.
00:04:47.300 Stop it.
00:04:48.680 Paper ballots work.
00:04:49.780 They're pretty foolproof.
00:04:51.160 Also, in-person voting works.
00:04:53.080 I don't like advanced voting going on forever and ever.
00:04:56.960 There should maybe be a couple of days of advanced voting,
00:04:59.440 and it should be really close to the actual election day.
00:05:03.260 Because if you're voting before the entire election narrative has played out,
00:05:07.880 I question a little bit on whether your vote would have been changed if you saw the full election play out.
00:05:15.400 And that could hurt or harm a party I like or dislike.
00:05:18.960 So, and it's a very neutral way of doing things.
00:05:21.400 You should have to watch the entire movie before you decide if you like it or don't like it.
00:05:26.200 You might vote for a party that you didn't actually see fall on its face the day before election day
00:05:32.640 and do something stupid or announce a crazy policy.
00:05:35.900 This is how elections generally should work.
00:05:38.600 And it's never affected turnout.
00:05:40.080 If anything, turnout keeps going down for elections,
00:05:42.680 no matter how much easier we make voting.
00:05:45.620 I think you should actually have some skin in the game when you go out and vote
00:05:49.140 that you should have to, you know, maybe walk out of your house,
00:05:52.520 get into your car, or walk down the street.
00:05:54.140 It shows that you care enough.
00:05:56.100 Because the problem I have with mail-in votes is not that it's fraudulent or anything like that.
00:06:00.980 It would be, you'd have to be incredibly crafty and have a lot of time on your hands
00:06:05.120 to be able to basically fake a bunch of mail-in ballots.
00:06:08.060 But what it does is it leads to lazy voting.
00:06:10.860 A BC, like a political party worker could come to your house and just help you request a ballot
00:06:16.720 and then come back and help you fill it in.
00:06:18.380 Something that you would have never done unless they showed up
00:06:21.100 and you don't really care that much.
00:06:22.760 So I'd rather we have people voting who actually care to vote themselves
00:06:26.780 rather than a bunch of people who are just merely siding with someone
00:06:30.980 that I guess they're okay with voting as long as they do all the work for them.
00:06:34.740 That's not really much of a vote in my mind.
00:06:36.780 Obviously, it still counts if that's the rule
00:06:39.140 and parties should adapt themselves to what the rules are.
00:06:41.980 But like another creator who I fully endorse, Frank Vaughn said,
00:06:45.720 he lives in Saskatchewan and was covering the Saskatchewan election.
00:06:48.140 Why is it that in rural areas, in like Athabasca riding in Saskatchewan,
00:06:54.140 one of the big, really like the massive rural ridings that actually the NDP wins in Saskatchewan,
00:06:59.700 there's two of them right side by side at the north part of the province.
00:07:03.280 Why in Athabasca was there only 31 people requesting mail-in ballots?
00:07:08.040 In a hyper-rural riding where you would assume people would be more incentivized to have a ballot
00:07:14.680 mailed to them and then they return it that way so they don't have to drive
00:07:17.920 potentially 35 minutes to the nearest polling station
00:07:21.180 or maybe an hour to the nearest advanced polling station
00:07:23.460 because they are not exactly going to scatter the entire riding
00:07:27.200 with hundreds and hundreds of advanced polling stations
00:07:29.560 to be within 10 minutes of everyone.
00:07:31.620 It takes a while.
00:07:33.100 And to me, and then you'd see like Regina and Saskatoon ridings
00:07:37.240 where there were thousands, like 1,300 mail-in ballot requests
00:07:40.920 in a riding where you could walk down the street and vote in 10 minutes.
00:07:44.680 At the furthest point of a riding, you could easily go and vote within 10 minutes.
00:07:48.880 And what that says to me is that it's really a lot of political parties
00:07:52.780 basically agitating people to take up mail-in ballots.
00:07:55.400 People who wouldn't have voted unless a poll worker came to their house
00:07:58.840 or not poll worker, but a party worker came to their house
00:08:01.580 and told them to request a ballot, then came back and bothered them to fill it out.
00:08:05.900 It's gamifying elections and I've never really liked that.
00:08:09.460 But now let's get back to this.
00:08:11.040 I'm sorry, I went so off base there for a second.
00:08:12.960 But hopefully you guys are still following along.
00:08:15.280 But Robert Shaw now says today, just three hours ago,
00:08:18.780 New! Elections BC says it was actually 28 votes missing,
00:08:22.300 miscounted in Surrey-Guilford, not the 14 it reported yesterday.
00:08:26.860 The margin of NDP victory right now remains at 21 votes
00:08:30.320 pending the judicial recount this week.
00:08:32.480 So I think they also had, like, so they couldn't even get the amount of balance
00:08:35.540 they found right.
00:08:36.700 And I'm pretty sure this also has nothing to do with the glitch.
00:08:39.540 So the glitch moved a bunch of votes towards the Conservatives.
00:08:43.160 And then also, when I say the glitch, I mean, after they solved the glitch,
00:08:46.460 the Conservatives gained some votes in the riding on net.
00:08:49.640 And now they've found another 28 votes, which I believe that they are preserving
00:08:53.460 to then count later during the judicial recount.
00:08:57.760 At some point, I'd almost just say, just do Guilford over again.
00:09:01.200 Because it's so messed up.
00:09:02.540 And the fact that people are finding ballots here and there that just got misplaced.
00:09:05.660 Just, you know, how, if you are Hanveer in that riding, the Conservative candidate,
00:09:10.700 are you going to be satisfied if you lose by, like, five votes or 15 votes
00:09:14.480 or anything below 100?
00:09:16.140 That that was probably what the real result was
00:09:18.740 and somebody just didn't misplace something here or there
00:09:21.120 and that we can totally assume that Gary Begg won.
00:09:24.160 I don't think that you could actually feel that way.
00:09:26.600 But now I just want to pull up another thing just on now us having David Eby coming out now
00:09:35.860 and saying that we need to have this panel to review election procedures
00:09:39.760 because, man, I really want to push this in all the NDP people's faces
00:09:43.480 who, again, attacked me as if I'm a crazy person for thinking that the process wasn't done well.
00:09:48.380 So we have Richard Zussman here saying,
00:09:51.140 New, Premier David Eby says in order to address missing ballots by Elections BC,
00:09:55.880 the BC NDP will propose an all-party committee to examine the systems used,
00:10:00.600 steps taken by Elections BC, hear from experts, and recommend improvements for future elections.
00:10:05.900 You don't even really need an all-candidates committee.
00:10:08.520 Maybe poll workers in rural areas shouldn't be storing ballot boxes at their homes.
00:10:12.300 That seems like a bad idea.
00:10:14.280 It's not because I think that they're going to do something,
00:10:16.620 but the whole point is that you should have processes
00:10:19.220 that even if the most mischievous person was involved in BC elections,
00:10:23.500 we would never have to worry if anything would happen
00:10:25.560 because all the ballots are locked in the same location with surveillance.
00:10:29.600 This is also why advanced voting is silly
00:10:31.840 because it requires all this extra surveillance
00:10:33.960 in order to make sure that nobody messes with ballots.
00:10:37.420 I don't even think anyone messed with ballots in this election,
00:10:40.020 but the whole point is that there's all these obvious areas of security failures
00:10:44.220 that need to be resolved.
00:10:45.840 You know, other things like, again, tabulators have just been slowing down votes
00:10:50.080 and now there's glitches.
00:10:51.560 I don't think we even have nearly as much issues with counting ballots by hand
00:10:55.900 and we have far less mistakes.
00:10:57.740 So let's get rid of them and we get to save money.
00:11:00.700 Maybe, you know, mail-in ballots should be a little bit more secured around
00:11:05.480 how far away do you live from your polling station?
00:11:07.860 Do you have an illness that prevents you from being able to vote in person?
00:11:11.520 Are you, you know, away from home?
00:11:13.240 Do you work for the military?
00:11:14.420 Do you work for the Navy?
00:11:15.580 That seems better to me rather than having just tens of thousands of votes
00:11:19.540 coming in way after Election Day.
00:11:22.340 Yes, postmarked on the correct day, but now it just becomes this silly game.
00:11:26.220 Oh, not silly game, but it becomes like foolish that we're all sitting around
00:11:29.720 wondering how many votes are still left to come in.
00:11:32.180 The mail-in voting at a day to get your ballot postmarked should be like a week before Election Day
00:11:39.860 if you are going to vote that way and it should be limited on who can actually request it.
00:11:44.220 You got legs, you can go down and vote in person.
00:11:47.240 I don't mind that telephone voting is there for people who are blind and it's easier for them,
00:11:52.520 but even when there is like a rainstorm, it shouldn't then result in everyone being able
00:11:57.340 to use the system, a system that's really not meant for everyone to use it,
00:12:01.200 where all you need is like, I think, a SIN card and an ID to vote.
00:12:04.800 What would stop you if you were in a household full of people who just didn't want to vote?
00:12:08.520 You were just picking up their driver's licenses and SIN cards out of their wallets
00:12:11.660 and just start calling in votes for everybody.
00:12:13.700 That's kind of a problem.
00:12:15.720 But anyways, now I just want to move on to something that Kirk Lubinov had said
00:12:19.520 that I thought was actually just a really good point,
00:12:22.000 a way of summarizing all the issues that we ended up having here
00:12:26.480 because I think he had a really good recap on the B.C. election.
00:12:32.940 So Kirk Lubinov, I always, I'm sorry, Kirk, if I ever say your name wrong.
00:12:38.860 As soon as a name is not like the whitest, most English name I've ever seen in my life,
00:12:43.060 I start tripping all over myself.
00:12:45.180 But Kirk says, elections B.C. recap.
00:12:48.300 Closed voting places because it rained too hard.
00:12:52.000 A password was forgotten for voting machines.
00:12:54.560 16,000 more mail-in ballots came than anticipated.
00:12:58.660 Staff were allowed to take unmarked ballots and sensitive documents home.
00:13:02.300 Five districts didn't have valid tabulator tapes against vote entries.
00:13:08.220 Surrey Guilford had 14 miscounted votes.
00:13:10.700 Then the number turned to be 28.
00:13:13.100 Data entry errors in 69 districts.
00:13:15.520 Didn't count votes in a whole ballot box.
00:13:18.020 Three judicial recounts still to be done by November 12th.
00:13:21.020 There's a third one outside of Surrey Guilford in Kelowna Center that I'm unaware of.
00:13:26.420 The B.C. election happened on October 19th and is still not even over.
00:13:32.220 And they told us none of this was possible.
00:13:34.440 Absolute clown show.
00:13:35.760 And I couldn't agree more.
00:13:38.640 This has been a clown show.
00:13:41.400 Saskatchewan got its entire election done fine.
00:13:44.360 Mostly in a day.
00:13:45.540 A couple more ridings needed to have some ballots counted the next day for mail-ins.
00:13:49.780 Even then, probably should have to mail it in beforehand so they can actually count on election day.
00:13:54.740 And if it's not in by election day, they're not counting it.
00:13:57.720 And so, you can do this better.
00:14:01.260 Anyone can do this better.
00:14:02.260 We have this actually happening in the U.S.
00:14:03.760 We're like Arizona and Pennsylvania and Michigan were preemptively coming out and saying it might take two weeks.
00:14:09.580 It's like, what?
00:14:10.880 No.
00:14:11.660 You don't say that.
00:14:12.680 You had how many years to make it faster?
00:14:15.860 Like, not even counting from 2020 to 2024, but from 2022 to 2024, you have two years.
00:14:23.140 You have two years to make the system better.
00:14:25.420 Florida made it better.
00:14:26.840 Saskatchewan and Canada made it better.
00:14:28.880 We have, like, New Brunswick had gotten it all done beforehand.
00:14:33.000 How is it that you guys suck so bad at BC elections?
00:14:36.020 It's actually sad that I had to see John Rustad have to come up with caveats when he was calling for reforms to be made that we need process reforms.
00:14:46.020 He had to first caveat by saying, I'm not saying that the results are not the results once all of the actual ballots come in and we properly count them and re-recount them in some of these districts.
00:14:56.740 But we need to make reforms.
00:14:57.720 It's sad that in our stupid age of legacy media bullies that we and, like, NDP party activists online, that we even have to caveat that to say that our elections should function properly.
00:15:10.020 You know, maybe.
00:15:10.960 Maybe they should function properly.
00:15:12.640 Maybe people should actually have, you know, their ballots counted on election night and it doesn't take more than two, three weeks to actually know what even occurred.
00:15:22.040 Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:15:25.140 Also, I'm not trying to be insulting to Brian Burgay, but I did move his little election piece of literature out for Lawrence Mock because, guys, this is Lawrence Mock November or whatever.
00:15:37.280 I'm just making stuff up right now.
00:15:38.900 But he was the candidate I was helping in the last week of the BC election.
00:15:42.580 Lawrence Mock is a fantastic candidate and he will be a fantastic MLA.
00:15:46.680 We got him across the finish line by 103 votes.
00:15:50.100 So, it was a blessing that I was able to be there in the last week, not because I'm particularly fantastic.
00:15:56.240 We just needed warm bodies in that riding and everyone I worked with ended up basically barely getting that thing over the finish line.
00:16:04.340 Really tough riding.
00:16:05.700 I actually believe we spent, like, a third of what Bob DeEath had spent in Maple Ridge East.
00:16:11.300 That was an absolute wild ride.
00:16:13.300 And maybe in the future I will make videos that kind of teach how proper door knocking should work, how proper poll district targeting should work, how proper on-the-ground local Facebook advertising should work.
00:16:26.620 And I say Facebook specifically because Facebook is still the king of political engagement.
00:16:31.740 People who vote are on Facebook.
00:16:33.980 People who are above the age of 45 are far more likely to vote than people who are under the age of 45.
00:16:39.420 So, that's why Facebook works better than X, Instagram, TikTok, all the rest.
00:16:45.640 YouTube is also a great one.
00:16:47.140 But it's YouTube and Facebook because people who vote actually use those two.
00:16:51.320 You never want people to focus way too much on X slash Twitter these days because it's the happening kind of a place.
00:16:57.820 But everyone on X is a partisan, a hardcore partisan.
00:17:01.520 It's very difficult to actually sway opinions on somewhere like X because everyone shows up with very strongly held beliefs.
00:17:10.560 Maybe you can mine out an election like BC another 10,000 votes because of your engagement on X.
00:17:17.160 But you're potentially going to be able to get more than 100,000 more votes with really good Facebook advertising with big organic reach somewhere like there.
00:17:26.160 Because people actually will stop and read a message on Facebook.
00:17:29.140 That's why it was so devastating to the National Telegraph when – oh, sorry, I got to get coffee late in the episode.
00:17:38.560 People – the thing is that people will actually stop and read a message on Facebook.
00:17:43.440 People will stop and read an article.
00:17:45.200 That's why it was so devastating when the Online News Act came into effect and Facebook rightfully so said we're not paying $50 million to the CBC and CTV news every year.
00:17:54.480 So we're just not going to let Facebook have any Canadian news on it.
00:17:58.000 That was devastating to us because 80% of our reach from the National Telegraph's written online paper were from Facebook because when people get to work in the morning, it's 8 a.m., 8.30.
00:18:08.860 They don't have to start working for – you don't have to start working right away.
00:18:11.740 It's not even 9 yet.
00:18:13.000 You'll sit there and read two or three or four articles.
00:18:15.800 People don't read articles on X.
00:18:17.340 They scroll.
00:18:18.260 They scroll, like, retweet, and move on.
00:18:20.380 They read a headline.
00:18:21.180 They don't read the whole thing.
00:18:22.420 Facebook was great for meaningful engagement, and that's still the case when it comes to even political engagement.
00:18:28.400 People read messages, watch political videos, a lot more stuff on Facebook.
00:18:32.600 I think Polyev probably has way more reach when it comes to Facebook than he does X, Instagram, TikTok, and all the other things combined.
00:18:40.600 Anyway, so that's it for me today, guys.
00:18:43.440 If you want to support the show, donate to the Give, Send, Go fund in the description of the video below as well as pinned at the top of the comments.
00:18:51.560 And also pinned at the top of the comments is my personal website, WyattClaypool.com.
00:18:56.780 If you guys want to sign up on the contact form, it will allow me to give you federal, provincial nomination and leadership race recommendations on good candidates to vote for.
00:19:07.660 I always try and drive people towards the most orthodox conservative candidates, people who are both fiscally and socially conservative, but always there are some mitigating factors within that.
00:19:18.360 Somebody might be able to edge someone out in my mind, even if they're not a perfect conservative, as long as they're super good on specific issues.
00:19:25.480 We have leadership races coming up in New Brunswick and Manitoba.
00:19:28.660 So if you live in those two provinces, definitely sign up on the website.
00:19:33.220 I already have somebody in Manitoba I will strongly be giving an endorsement to, and I have somebody in New Brunswick I want to encourage to run for the PC leadership race.
00:19:44.200 And in 2025, we will be having a mayoral election in Calgary, and I think Toronto as well.
00:19:50.740 So if you live in any of those jurisdictions, make sure to sign up on the website, and I can get you voting information, good candidates to back, volunteer for, donate to, through the website's email list.
00:20:02.900 Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:20:05.580 Have a good one.
00:20:06.520 Finally, I keep rambling.