Election recounts took place in seven ridings after judges examined affidavit evidence supporting six recount requests from the Progressive Conservative Party and one from the People’s Alliance of New Brunswick.
Aside from close voting margins and a bevy of spoiled ballots, Kris Austin, the People’s Alliance leader and candidate for Fredericton-Grand Lake, said “unknown glitches” became a problem which compromised the people’s trust in the vote counts.
“I’ve been getting a lot of phone calls and emails. People are overall concerned with the process and they felt a recount would bring into question the tabulators in the system. [A recount] would validate it, but either way hopefully it will give confidence back to the people.”
Austin also pointed to administrative errors in the system that he believed also compromised the election’s integrity, giving an example from his riding of a woman who voted but did not live in the riding.
A recount in Saint John Harbour proved to align with the tabulator. Liberal candidate Ed Doherty was confirmed Friday to have won by 71 votes, the same amount tabulated on election night.
In Saint John East, where Liberal Gary Keating won over PC Gary Savoie by just eight votes, the manual recount turned up one additional vote for Keating.
Four more recounts requested by the Progressive Conservatives were pending as of deadline.
During election night on Sept. 22, hours of delays prompted some concern of the previously untested voting software.
Penelope Starr, communications manager with Dominion Voting Systems, said the issues were derived not from the tabulators, but the external software used to expedite results to the media.
“We identified the non pre-approved third party software as being the source of the delay in reporting results to the media, and have since modified our best practices so that this situation will not arise again.”
Dominion Voting Systems is a global election system provider based in Toronto.
Jean-Pierre Kingsley, former chief electoral officer for Canada and current advisor to Dominion Voting Systems said in a statement:
“It is a basic tenet of democracy that election results be released to the public as soon as they are available – and technology has done a lot to make that possible. The danger lies in introducing software that is not pre-approved, which is unfortunately what happened in the case of Elections New Brunswick.”
Officials from Elections New Brunswick were unable to comment while recounts were underway.
