NaBloPoMo – Day 5 – We Had An Election Too
Here in BC we had an election recently. Because of COVID, a lot of us chose to use mail-in ballots. Here are two things I learned about mail in voting in BC elections:
- You can just write in the party name instead of the candidate’s name. Because our elections campaigns are short and the election was a snap one, they started sending out mail in ballots before candidates were finalized, so they just mailed write-in ballots. I assumed that you’d need to find the name of the person you wanted to vote for, but you could just write in the party name. In this case, I really was voting for the party more than the candidate (we have a new candidate in our riding, since our amazing outgoing MLA decided to retire, and I don’t know much about the new candidate), so I was happy that I could do that.
- Under BC’s current election law, they aren’t allowed to start counting mail-in ballots until 13 days after the election because all the ballots get mailed to one place and they need time to sort them and send them to their respective ridings to be counted. Something to do with the voters names needing to be crossed off a paper list of voter names. Apparently this law was in the process of being changed because we have like computers and stuff these days so they really should just be able to count all those mail in ballots centrally. But the election was supposed to be next year, so they hadn’t actually changed the law yet, and when a snap election was called, we had to use the existing law. Tomorrow is 13 days after the election, so they can start counting. But despite the larger than normal number of mail in ballots this year, the votes that were cast on election day were more than enough to determine that the BC NDP had won a majority. I think there are a few ridings where it’s close enough that the mail in ballots might make a difference, but not enough to change the government.
So tomorrow the counting of the mail in ballots starts and I’m glad that they will all be counted, given what’s happening south of the border.

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