Delays in election results were due to heavy early voter turnout prior to election

In some ridings in the province there were long delays in receiving the final results, but it wasn’t so much due to glitches as simple ballot counting.

Andy LeBlanc, director of policy and communications for Elections Nova Scotia, said there was a delay for votes in some of the 51 districts because of waiting for the “out of district” and write-in ballot counts across the province.

“There were about 22,000 ballots in those boxes,” he said.

As of 10:20 p.m., all write-in ballots had been counted and reported in electoral district numbers. ENS had about 25 teams counting the out of district ballots.

“The count took a lot longer than we had anticipated. A lot of that stuff came in between 1-2:30 a.m. basically.”

LeBlanc said an “out of district” vote means a vote from someone who voted outside his or her electoral district. He said those votes had to be sorted for the correct riding ballot boxes and then counted.

He said with a heavy early voter turnout, there were more ballots to be counted than had been anticipated

“That was certainly a factor.”

He said early votes are not counted until after the polls close to ensure the secrecy of the election.

In the Glace Bay riding, the last two of the 38 polls didn’t come in until almost 1 a.m.

LeBlanc said the process for recounts for Elections Nova Scotia includes if the difference in votes is below 10 — nine votes or less — which leads to an automatic recount.

“Anything above that is something the candidate or official agent would make a request to the local prothonotary,” he said.

“The decision would be entirely up to the judge.”

There were 2,134 rejected ballots across the province.

LeBlanc said there are a lot of reasons a ballot might be rejected, including if there was no mark on it recording a vote or perhaps if someone had checked off all the candidates.

“If it’s not clear who the candidate was that the person voted for, then it would likely be rejected,” he said.

“In a recount process those would be reexamined once again.”

The closet riding in the province was Cape Breton-Richmond, with incumbent Liberal MLA Michel P. Samson with 3,316 votes and PC candidate Alana Paon with 3,336, a 20vote difference. There were 41 rejected ballots in that riding.