Long wait for some poll results

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This article was published 05/10/2023 (811 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Candidates in Brandon West remained in a holding pattern on Wednesday as they waited for the final results from several outstanding polls as of mid-afternoon.

On Tuesday, Elections Manitoba spokesman Jack Rach told Winnipeg media that power outages had caused some issues with vote-counting machines, meaning that results continued to trickle in for many electoral districts late into the evening. However, delays continued in several constituencies into Wednesday.

Brandon West was one of several close races on Tuesday evening that left election watchers biting their nails. As of Wednesday afternoon, Brandon West PC candidate Wayne Balcaen was still anxiously waiting for final poll results. As off press time Wednesday, Balcaen led the vote tally over NDP candidate Quentin Robinson by 97 votes, with 51 of 56 advance and Outside ED polls reported.

“You know, they’ll have to pay for my blood pressure pills,” Balcaen joked on Wednesday. “Yeah, this is just strange, right? I was hoping by like, nine or nine-thirty last night, we would know the results. And we can say, you know, ‘Yay,’ or pack up the bags and go home.”

Despite requests by the Sun to interview a representative on Wednesday regarding the cause of delays with results this election, Elections Manitoba communications director Mike Ambrose instead issued a statement that attempted to reassure Manitobans that “this was a free and fair election, in spite of a combination of issues that arose.”

Ambrose stated that Tuesday morning storms caused power interruptions at polling places in many areas, prompting Elections Manitoba to use manual ballot boxes “to ensure voting continued uninterrupted.” At the close of polls, the statement read, ballots cast manually and by vote counting machine had to be combined.

He also cited new reporting and reconciliation procedures that extended the count time, along with firewall problems with the Elections Manitoba website that left voters unable to access the site for several hours on Tuesday.

“We are investigating what happened, but these problems caused interruptions to website access,” he said.

In spite of the problems, Ambrose defended the delivery of the results, saying that a lot went well with the delivery of the election, with new tools like the electronic voters list, bar code scanners for voter information cards and print on demand ballots for advance voting that “allowed us to offer better service and more opportunities for Manitobans (to) participate in a free, fair and accessible election.”

But that explanation seems lacking to Brandon University political studies Prof. Kelly Saunders, who said that Elections Manitoba had ample time to prepare, do their test runs and talk with other jurisdictions that operated similar machines.

“It seems that this is a little over the top for problems,” Saunders said.

As of mid-afternoon on Wednesday, final results were still outstanding in seven electoral districts in the province, including Dauphin and Brandon West in western Manitoba, as well as the Winnipeg-area constituencies of McPhillips, Lagimodière, Waverley and Tuxedo.

Balcaen said he kept watching the Elections Manitoba website well into the early hours of Wednesday morning, going through data and waiting for updated poll results.

“Finally at about 2:30 a.m. I said, well, I gotta get some sleep. But then when I got up this morning, around 7 a.m. I checked again and no change. So it was kind of like, you know, the up and down roller coaster here. It has been a tight, tight race all night. Like when the first few ballots, first few polls came in. I had a 200 or some odd lead and then slowly it started diminishing and then changed to Quentin having a lead. And then that number slowly dwindled, and then changing over again. So it’s been up and down.”

For his part, Robinson maintained that, although he didn’t start out with expectations of a close race with Balcaen, his view of that changed as the election campaign wore on.

“Anybody looking at the history thought that I should not be expecting it to be close. But as the as the days went by, and I knocked on more doors, and I looked at the responses that I was getting, I thought, You know what, this may be closer than people think,” Robinson told the Sun. “And the more people started to say, ‘You know what, I think that’ll be closer than you think,’ it started to look like — better be ready for that.”

But he also suggested that Manitoba voters were also driven to the NDP in response to the Progressive Conservative election campaign, which has been highly controversial in both tone and content.

The PCs were dogged throughout the campaign by accusations they were playing American-style wedge politics, in particular surrounding party leader Heather Stefanson’s refusal to search the Prairie Green landfill for the remains of two Indigenous women believed to have been murdered. These issues also came up during local debates, including the media debate for Brandon West hosted by The Brandon Sun and its partners.

“I think obviously, that in in many places, there was a move to the orange except in rural areas,” Robinson said. “So like, it was not strictly speaking, predictable if it would have happened here in Brandon … It’s partly about just the rising tide of the NDP.”

And in the Dauphin constituency, where several polls were still outstanding late Wednesday afternoon, NDP candidate Ron Kostyshyn found himself leading 4,254 to the PC candidate’s 3,910 as of 5:50 p.m. Kostyshyn said he always knew it was going to be a tight race.

“We would be foolish to think otherwise,” he said Wednesday. “So definitely it showed up during the election, as we have all witnessed.”

As of press time Wednesday, the NDP had won or were leading in 34 constituencies, the Progressive Conservatives won or were leading in 22 districts, and the Liberals held one remaining seat.

» mgoerzen@brandonsun.com