VICTORIA — The NDP has overtaken the B.C. Conservatives in the ongoing count of absentee votes in a crucial Metro Vancouver riding, putting Premier David Eby on course to win government with a razor-thin majority.
An update from Elections B.C. at 1 p.m. on Monday put the NDP ahead in Surrey-Guildford by nine votes.
If it hangs on there and in other races, it will have a one-seat majority in the 93-riding legislature.
Elections B.C. vote counters were tallying more than 22,000 absentee and special ballots provincewide on Monday, nine days after the province’s election.
The Conservatives had been ahead in the closest race of Surrey-Guildford by 12 votes going into the tally, but there were an estimated 226 votes still to count and hourly vote counts saw the lead whittled away.
In the 1 p.m. update, the NDP was elected or leading in 47 seats, while John Rustad’s B.C. Conservatives were leading or elected in 44 and the Greens had won two seats.
A count of more than 43,000 mail-in and assisted telephone votes provincewide over the weekend put the NDP within range of victory in Surrey-Guildford, sending the race down to the absentee ballots.
Conservative candidate Honveer Singh Randhawa had gone into the weekend’s count with a lead of 103 over the NDP incumbent Garry Begg.
While Monday’s absentee vote could finally produce a winner in the election, there could still be judicial recounts in any riding where the margin is less than one-500th of all votes cast.
In Surrey-Guildford, where an estimated 19,306 votes were cast, the margin for a judicial recount is about 38 votes or fewer.
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A full hand recount on Sunday in Surrey City Centre resulted in the NDP lead there being reduced by three votes to 175, while a partial recount in Kelowna Centre saw the Conservative lead cut by four votes to 68.
That has been a further cut to 64 in the absentee count. The NDP lead in Surrey City Centre has grown to 200.
The result of a full recount in Juan de Fuca-Malahat, where the NDP leads by 116 votes, is also to be announced Monday.
Aisha Estey, president of the B.C. Conservative Party, said she spent the weekend in a warehouse watching the counting of mail-in ballots.
In a post on social media, she said: “Elections B.C. staff have been working tirelessly and doing their best within the confines of the legislation that governs their work.
“Would we have liked mail-ins to be counted closer to (election day)? Sure. But I saw nothing that caused me concern.”