City official apologizes for voting delays in Vancouver byelection
City manager Paul Mochrie acknowledges 'unacceptable' voting delays, as some voters reported hours-long waits
Vancouver's city manager is apologizing for the voting delays in Saturday's byelection, after residents faced up to hours-long waits to cast their ballots.
The long cues backlogged polling stations across the city, leaving hundreds of people still in line after polls closed at 8 p.m. PT, and delaying results past midnight.
The issue was likely largely driven by a January council decision, brought forward by staff, to cut the number of polling stations in half and the number of people staffing them by nearly two-thirds.
Paul Mochrie, Vancouver's city manager, on Sunday apologized to voters impacted by what he called unacceptable voting delays in the byelection, especially after a record turnout for advance voting and mail-in ballots.
"We made a number of assumptions in planning for this election, around vote turnout, distribution, capacity to process votes," he told CBC News on Sunday.
"Clearly, from what we saw yesterday, those assumptions were flawed, and we did not have sufficient resources to process the turnout that we received."
In total, 67,962 ballots were cast in the byelection, for a voter turnout of about 15 per cent — a 40 per cent increase from 2017, when the turnout was around 11 per cent.
Following an inquiry by CBC News, the City of Vancouver said there were 25 polling stations staffed by 265 workers Saturday, down from 50 stations and 631 workers in 2017.
Overall, the city's budget for the byelection increased from $1.5 million in 2017 to $2 million for 2025.
Mochrie said the election planning fell entirely on civil servants, and not to elected officials, and acknowledged that the turnout was higher than what officials had planned for.
He said the next step is to get the councillors-elect sworn in, which he estimated will happen later this month or early in May.
Councillors-elect look ahead
The byelection was a chastening result for the city's ruling ABC Party, which still maintains a majority on council but whose candidates finished a distant sixth and seventh in the preliminary count.
Progressive candidates Sean Orr, of the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE), and Lucy Maloney, of OneCity Vancouver, instead took the top spots.
Orr, a housing activist, landscaper and dishwasher, had previously run with VOTE Socialist in the 2022 election.
He told CBC News he was blown away by having received the most votes in the byelection, and called it a humbling experience.
"It just confirmed what I thought about Vancouverites — that they care about the city, we care about the city, we care about integrity and we care about each other," he said.
Orr and fellow councillor-elect Maloney said they would push back on Mayor Ken Sim and ABC's agenda.
In particular, the two mentioned a recent move to freeze construction of new supportive housing in the city, as well as a motion to bring back the option of natural gas heating in new homes in the city, which ultimately failed.
"It just shows how dissatisfied people are with Ken Sim and ABC, and the direction they're taking in our city, that people were prepared to go to so much trouble to stand in line and participate in our democracy yesterday," Maloney said on Sunday.
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With files from Sohrab Sandhu and Justin McElroy