Recount ordered for West Vancouver election results

The Oct. 20 West Vancouver election results will be recounted, a provincial court judge ordered on Wednesday.

Mary-Anne Booth barely beat second-place candidate Mark Sager, with only 21 votes separating the two candidates.

With Booth's tally of 4,394 votes, the difference was less than one per cent.

According to an affidavit filed by the district of West Vancouver's chief election officer, Mark Brown, one of Sager's representatives asked for a manual recount on Oct. 24, when Brown was presenting the official results, but Brown refused the recount.

"I advised that I would not be conducting a recount of the ballots as I did not have any reason to believe that the results produced by the vote counting units were inaccurate," Brown said in the affidavit.

Sager didn't contest the election results, but outgoing mayor Michael Smith — who signed his nomination papers — did, along with council candidate Jim Finkbeiner who was just 20 votes shy of the last council seat.

Smith's lawyer, Kevin Westell argued in B.C. Provincial Court in North Vancouver on Wednesday that not all ballots should be manually recounted, only a selection of ballots determined to be defective. 

He noted that there were 11,818 ballots cast in the election, but 68 fewer votes for mayor recorded.

"We say this is odd," he told the judge.

"Voting machines are not infallible," Westell argued in court. "No machine — even a voting machine — is perfect."

Westell said he wasn't claiming any malfeasance or irregularity in the vote count, just that there was a flaw in the process.

District of West Vancouver lawyer Paul Hildebrand argued that to have 68 ballots cast without a vote for mayor isn't unusual — people commonly choose not to vote in all of the races for mayor, council or school board. 

"It's the position of West Vancouver that the chief electoral officer did his job," said Hildebrand.

Mark Rowan, counsel for Mary-Ann Booth, didn't take long to make his case before the judge. He said, in his view, all of the votes have been counted.

"My client's position is there's no basis for a recount," said Rowan.

Recount process

The recount has been hastily organized, as a Friday deadline for election results looms.

It will take place at the gym at the Gleneagles Community Centre in West Vancouver, beginning at 8:30 a.m. Officials expect it to take all day.

Election officers will review all ballots, pulling any aside that appear to have irregularities, or have the selection for mayor left blank. They'll be counted by hand, while the remainder go into the 14 vote-counting machines.

The final tally will be brought to court, where Judge Joanne Challenger will declare the results, or deal with any further submissions from lawyers.

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