The District of West Vancouver’s extremely narrow election results are now in question with a judicial recount requested.
Current Mayor Michael Smith and council candidate Jim Finkbeiner have applied to the courts for a judicial recount, kickstarting a process that could possibly see the election results - and makeup of the next council, which is due to be sworn in on Monday night - overturned.
During the election campaign, Smith endorsed mayoral candidate (and former mayor) Mark Sager who finished just 21 votes behind mayor-elect (and current councillor) Mary-Ann Booth. Finkbeiner finished seventh overall in the council race, just 20 votes shy of Sharon Thompson, who won the sixth and final council seat.
In their application, Finkbeiner and Smith allege the district’s chief election officer “failed to properly adjudicate the determination of official election results and declined to conduct the official determination in a reasonable way by failing to conduct some form of recount ‘by hand.’
The application includes an affidavit from Jonathan Tweedale, one of Sager’s scrutineers, who attended and made the request for a recount by hand before results were finalized on Oct. 24.
“(The chief election officer) explained to me that it was unnecessary for him to look at any of the ballots because the voting machines do not ever make mistakes,” Tweedale stated in his affidavit. “The chief election officer further informed me, in response to my questioning, that ‘nothing could convince him’ to look at any of the ballots with the naked eye and that he had ‘100 per cent confidence’ in the machines’ powers to divine each voter’s intended choice.”
Smith and Finkbeiner are scheduled to be in North Vancouver provincial court on Wednesday morning.
The District of West Vancouver’s lawyers had not yet prepared an official response to the petition by press time, but district spokeswoman Donna Powers said they would be in court to argue that a recount is unnecessary.
“We feel that the initial count was accurate,” Powers said. “What we saw on (election) night was confirmed at least four times. Every single recount that was done was exactly the same…
The election staff will attend court with all of the election materials including the records of ballots, the printouts from the voting tabulating machines and also the sealed boxes of ballots. It will be up to the judge to determine what action she wants taken,” Powers said.
If the request for a recount is approved by the court, it must be completed by Friday, November 2.
In an interview, Smith said he filed the petition over concerns about “67 ballots that were never counted.”
Of the 11,818 ballots cast in the election, there were 67 that did not register a vote for any of the mayoral candidates.
“I think some of the residents are concerned there were some uncounted ballots so they asked me what I thought. I said I certainly thought all the ballots should be counted. That’s what a recount is, isn’t it?” he said. “They thought that somebody in the mayors’ position should make sure all the ballots were properly counted and accounted for.”
Neither the application to the court, nor the affidavit make reference to the 67 ballots, however.
According to Powers, those ballots are simply “undervotes” – people who chose not to fill out their entire ballot.
“If you look at the school trustees, the difference would be in the hundreds. A lot of people do not vote for the school trustees,” she said.
Sager said he’d largely moved on from the narrow defeat and that he is not counting on the election’s outcome to be overturned. But he added “lots and lots of people” have been calling him demanding to know what is going on.
“I think it’s in response to the feeling that the fundamental point of our democracy is that every vote gets counted,” he said. “The simple question that I would ask is… why not just pull out the 67 ballots and have a look at them?”
In response for a request for comment, Finkbeiner sent a statement.
“The election results were very close, hence the request for a recount,” it read.
Booth did not respond to the North Shore News’ request for comment by press time on Tuesday.
According to the official results, 320 ballots were spoiled, two were unaccounted for, one mail-in ballot was rejected and 32 mail-in ballots arrived too late to be counted.
