One day after revealing hundreds of votes in the B.C. election had been misplaced or miscounted, the province’s chief electoral officer held an online webinar to explain — but not apologize for — all the problems chipping away at public confidence in the electoral system.

“These mistakes were a result of human error,” said Anton Boegman, who blamed a variety of factors, including workload and weather.

“Our elections rely on the work of over 17,000 election officials from communities across the province. Election officials were working 14 hours or more on voting days and on final voting day in particular faced extremely challenging weather conditions in many parts of the province.

“These conditions likely contributed to these mistakes.”

Boegman showed little contrition in outlining how Elections BC missed an entire box of 861 ballots in Prince George-Mackenzie, and racked up tabulation errors affecting 779 additional votes in 69 of B.C.’s 93 ridings.

Pretty big mistakes by the election agency and its officials. In the case of the missing ballot box, unprecedented. But Boegman tried to suggest government changes made to allow electronic tabulators, laptop voting lists and vote-in-any-district provisions also played a role in the problems.

“It was also the first provincial election that was administered following the significant changes to the electoral legislation that were made in 2019,” said Boegman.

“And while this process was fully tested........

© BIV